Usa

m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y

USAGwendolyn Wright

m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y

This international series examines the forms and consequences of modernarchitecture. Modernist visions and revisions are explored in their national contextagainst a backdrop of aesthetic currents, economic developments, political trendsand social movements. Written by experts in the architectures of the respectivecountries, the series provides a fresh, critical reassessment of Modernism’s positiveand negative effects, as well as the place of architectural design in twentieth-century history and culture.

Series editor: Vivian Constantinopoulos

Already published:

BritainAlan Powers

FinlandRoger Connah

Forthcoming:

BrazilRichard Williams

FranceJean-Louis Cohen

GermanyIain Boyd Whyte

GreeceAlexander Tzonis and Alkistis Rodi

IndiaPeter Scriver

ItalyDiane Ghirardo

JapanBotond Bognar

NetherlandsNancy Stieber

SpainDavid Cohn

SwitzerlandStanislaus von Moos

TurkeySibel Bozdogan

R E A K T I O N B O O K S

USAm o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y

Gwendolyn Wright

For Tom, with joy

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street

London ec1v 0dx, uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2008

Copyright © Gwendolyn Wright 2008

The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book by the

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Slovenia

by MKT Print d.d.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Wright, Gwendolyn

USA. – (Modern architectures in history)

1. Modern movement (Architecture) – United States

2. Architecture – United States – 20th century

I. Title

720.9'73'0904

isbn-13: 978–1–86189–344–4

isbn-10: 1–86189–344–2

Introduction

o n eModern Consolidation, 1865–1893

t woProgressive Architectures, 1894–1918

t h r e eElectric Modernities, 1919–1932

f o u rArchitecture, the Public and the State, 1933–1945

f i veThe Triumph of Modernism, 1946–1964

s i xChallenging Orthodoxies, 1965–1984

s eve nDisjunctures and Alternatives, 1985 to the Present

E p i l o g u e

References

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Photo Acknowledgements

Index

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17

47

79

113

151

195

235

276

279

298

305

307

310

Contents

‘Architecture USA’stamps, 1982 issue,showing Frank LloydWright’s Fallingwater(1937), Walter GropiusHouse (1937), Mies vander Rohe’s Crown Hallat the Illinois Instituteof Technology, Chicago(1956), and EeroSaarinen’s DullesInternational Airport(1962).

American modern architecture is as lively and mutable as quicksilver.Artists in every medium have delighted in the surprising play of formsand types. Architects claim freedom and democracy as birthrights forevery citizen, sometimes presuming these are assurances rather thanaspirations. Popular culture has eagerly appropriated icons of modernarchitecture and design without generating much respect for architects.

Praise has mixed freely with invective. The European avant-gardelauded Midwestern factories and grain elevators as the magnificent evi-dence of a new age. Americans were considered liberated from the past,or ignorant of its lessons and beholden to commerce. New York remainsunfinished, impossible to pinion, simultaneously ‘a new Babel and a CityDivine’.1 Countless observers have deplored the vulgar consumerism ofLos Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami – then enjoyed their pleasures.Modern office buildings and housing came under widespread attack inthe late 1960s, condemned as cold and callous or gaudy and ‘plastic’. Themost contemptuous critics may be those who denounce all aspects ofAmerican modern architecture as a debased bastardization of ‘trueModernism’, revering the European Modern Movement as the soleincarnation of progressive values.

Can there be any coherence among these wildly divergent opinionsand the works they seek to describe? No single definition can encompassthe phantasmagoria of American modern architecture, but that doesn’tmean that everything qualifies. The designation is stitched together byambitions, processes and effects more than any formal rules.Modernism confronts contemporary life rather than seeking to escape;it tries to redirect, improve or at least enliven present-day realities. Thegoals extend beyond noble intentions about artistic innovation andsocial progress, for we can no longer exclude the modernity of specta-cles, self-promotion and profit incentives, even if they should not beembraced wholeheartedly. The actors include world-renowned figuresbut also relatively unknown clients and designers. Some are not archi-tects at all, since professionals account for only about 10 per cent of what

Introduction

Joseph Stella, Battleof Lights, ConeyIsland, Mardi Gras,1913–14, painting, oil on canvas.

gets built in America. I am suggesting an inclusive, dynamic and contest-ed perspective, not a harmonious consensus.

A century of canonical histories has defined modern architecture interms of universal beliefs and forms, a worthy aspiration yet one dismis-sive of the multifarious conditions in which all people operate,including architects. We have recently become more aware of ecologicalissues and the fact that ‘modern man’– the presumed beneficiary of well-intended reforms – marginalized people who did not fit one model ofneeds and desires. National and local cultures still seem problematic,however, given legitimate apprehensions about xenophobic fervour andprovincialism. Yet nations remain salient factors even in today’s globalworld. The materiality of building responds to formal regulations andinformal conventions. National imaginaries sustain shared notionsabout the public sphere and private life, influencing even those whowant to challenge such norms. These configurations are never cohesive.No formulas or essences, in other words, but definite patterns.

The Modern Architectures in History series considers such patternsinside and across the boundaries of many nations. Each instance revealsdistinctive imageries and meanings that often reverberate elsewhereonce we know to look for them. The United States shared many qualitieswith European Modernism: a commitment to social reform, confidencein the sciences, a passion for new technologies and a pervasive fascina-tion with ‘the new’. It appropriated from Africa, Asia and Latin Americaas well in a flow of ideas, capital and people that was always multi-directional. By the late nineteenth century, most of the world saw Americaas the epitome of modernity, with architectural advances assuming a keyrole in this mental construction: towering skyscrapers, rationalized fac-tories, vibrant settings for popular culture, verdant parkways andmass-produced, moderate-cost dwellings.2

Like all cultures, America’s is paradoxical. Traditions coexist withinnovations; utopian visions of the future with nostalgic fantasiesabout the past – including earlier stages of Modernism. Americansfollow trends, yet they remain deeply suspicious of orthodoxies,mindful of contingencies and unintended consequences. This inclina-tion aligns with pragmatist tendencies, both the late nineteenth-centuryphilosophers William James and John Dewey, who asked what ideasactually do in the world, and the less systematic predilections of count-less others, including architects and designers, eager to tinker with (andsometimes to transform) established practices. Such an approach tendsinevitably towards ‘patchwork’, but it is not inherently anti-theoretical.As James put it, ‘Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them upand sets each one at work.’3

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In that spirit, this book unstiffens some familiar premises in order toexpand canonical histories, reframe customary narratives, unravel tan-gled ambiguities. Such an unwieldy subject requires a clear structure.Each chapter is organized around three realms of modern life: workspaces, domestic spaces and public spaces – including infrastructurelinkages and urban/suburban design. Typologies provide an alternativeto more usual classifications based on individuals or stylistic trends.They encourage a broader spectrum, juxtaposing exceptional buildingswith ‘minor’ or generic examples that history so often erases. Readerscan admire the impressive achievements of American modern architec-ture, singular and collective, without denying destructive tendencies,lacklustre replications and unequal access to modern improvements.Cultural history reaches beyond the hermetic limits of a supposedlyautonomous ‘architecture culture’.4 Just as reformulations in other dis-ciplines have affected design, so they provide fresh insights in myconceptualization. For example, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theorytraces the multiple, mostly unanticipated associations of humans and‘things’ as agents in the world. An historian of science, Latour was think-ing of microbes or information – but why not buildings?5

Too many architects and historians still insist that European émigrésand their loyal American disciples brought Modernism to the UnitedStates, as if in a suitcase, with the 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture atNew York’s Museum of Modern Art (moma). The chronology of thisbook overturns that myth. American modern architecture has a muchearlier lineage beginning in the late nineteenth-century aftermath of theCivil War, a struggle about unity and equality that engendered a full-fledged modern nation with a transcontinental infrastructure, anational economy, extensive industrialization, pervasive media and athriving consumer culture – all of which directly affected architecture.

A brief discussion about language helps clarify some of the conun-drums.6 Modernism is a broad cultural phenomenon with striking shiftsin forms and intentions between (and within) different intellectual orartistic domains. While these inevitably change over time, the word alsorefers to specific radical artistic movements of the early twentieth century– and to right now. Modernization is the mission of various specialists,including architects, who viewed economic rationalization, standard-ized norms and expanded markets as an inexorable historical trajectory.The experience of modernity has elicited conflicting human responses,exhilarating liberation but also materialism, alienation, a sense of lossor foreboding. This makes it untenable to speak of a single modernconsciousness rather than passionate, contradictory and contentious vari-ations. The modernist project envisions social amelioration through

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radical change. Early certainties have disappeared, giving way to morepersonal experiments and aesthetic games. A resigned nihilism nowseems to prevail; as the art historian T. J. Clark recently lamented, ‘Themodernist past is a ruin . . . our antiquity.’7 Fortunately, aspirations forprogress continue, responding to contemporary conditions, utilizing thelatest technologies while drawing upon what has come before. The mod-ernist project still moves forward, seeking a more sustainable, equitableand, yes, a more beautiful world.

If the history of American modern architecture is diverse and contra-dictory, there are some clear consistencies. This book emphasizes fiveinterconnected themes, each resonant in today’s world. First, Americanslike to mix genres and sources. Terms like creole or mestizaje apply toarchitecture as well as to language and physiognomy. Regional inflec-tions have long infused American Modernism. Architects have drawn onlocal vernaculars to reinvigorate the inevitable stiffness of official or‘universal’ languages (as with literature at least since the fifteenth cen-tury).8 Hybridity, once a term of disdain, has become a positive value,whereas purity relies on exclusion. These qualities, so conspicuous in anAmerican context, remind us that creativity is always multivalent in itsorigins as well as its consequences.

Second is the indisputable role of commercial culture, its effects oftencrudely imitative, sometimes daringly inventive. Popular culture hascontaminated but also re-energized high art, infusing it with unexpect-ed outside influences. The search for new markets frequently adoptedmodern motifs, if only for their upbeat imagery. The private sector hasbeen dominant – especially wealthy clients, corporations and major cul-tural institutions, which come under state auspices in most countries. Asa result, American architects have rarely enjoyed the authority of theircolleagues in other places. Not just clients, but businessmen andbankers, merchant builders and marketing experts, politicians of everystripe, an ambitious middle class of consumers, labour unions andimmigrants all have their say. These voices often collide with those ofarchitects or draw them into insidious webs of power.

Third, industrial production in the United States has accentuatedgrowth and diversity rather than uniformity, anticipating today’s ‘masscustomization’. This is especially true in the realm of housing, a funda-mental concern in every instauration of Modernism. Designers haveexperimented with production systems and modern materials rangingfrom steel to synthetics and recycled timber. Like most Americans,architects have typically embraced the latest technologies with enthusi-asm, presuming them to be inherently positive, their reachall-pervasive. The result has stimulated rising standards for human

1 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n

comfort, efficiency and individual self-expression – together withrelentless consumerism and inequalities.

The media have been a fourth influence, including both popular andhighly specialized professional publications or events. New currents in themainstream profession, the academic discipline and the self-declaredavant-garde have all been heavily mediated. Designers eagerly seized oneach new format: lithographs, photographs, mapping, cinema and digitalimagery. Advertising connected architecture with business, industry,fashion and popular culture. Some individuals have made their mark ascelebrities – most notably Frank Lloyd Wright, who figures in every chap-ter of this book until his death in 1959, and Philip Johnson, as arbiter andarchitect since 1932. The media also enhanced the allure of verbal languagewith labels, analogies and buzzwords.

Fifth and most auspicious is a long-standing environmental sensibil-ity. Thoughtful site planning has enhanced many individual structuresand large-scale building groups. Many architects have accentuated nat-ural landscapes and tried to mitigate ecological or climactic problems.American Modernism has rightly been characterized as ‘Geo-Architecture’, given how often it highlights surroundings, especiallydramatic sites, and fuses structure with infrastructure. Unfortunately,the belief in the regenerative power of nature also tolerated a rapacious

Some of the archi-tects featured on thecover of Time from1938, 1949, 1952,1963, 1964 and 1979.


disregard for land and ecological balance, as if these were eternalresources.

Every history inevitably engages present-day circumstances. This bookraises questions about architecture in the twenty-first century even as itanalyses the past. Contemporary debates about ecologies, technologies,patronage, symbolism and form build upon a lineage even as they gobeyond it. If today’s architecture seems inchoate, this is nothing new andeven potentially positive, since the tendency towards rigid dichotomies isequally ingrained, each faction using the threat of the other to legitimateits own narrowly self-righteous position. Neo-traditionalists deform his-tory by evoking imaginary pasts and facile accusations that modernarchitecture is inherently inhumane. Neo-avant-gardists likewise distortreality, disdaining history and public opinion outside their own bubble,rekindling suspicions of modern architecture as narcissistic indulgence.But why should anyone have to choose between illusions of a return or arupture? The ‘excluded middle’ – what William James simply called the‘in-between’ – is a fascinating and capacious realm to explore.9

A broader historical perspective will always challenge establishedassumptions, but it will not undermine individual talents or distinctivearchitectural concerns to place them in a larger context. My selectionemphasizes breadth and diversity, balancing major buildings, someincontestable masterworks, with lesser-known trends and examples. Ihave not hesitated to point out overlaps with the world of builders and

Hoover Dam (nowBoulder Dam),Colorado (1928–38):‘American “Geo-Architecture”’, fromthe Magazine of Art(January 1944).

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popular culture which determines the vast majority of what is built,and with architects who were significant in their time but since forgot-ten. Rather than simply describing stars I highlight constellations thatcan be read in multiple ways and seen from different perspectives.

History is an ongoing and fluid process, not a sacred narrative. It canilluminate alternative positions, so necessary within the homogenizingforces of today’s global economy. This book is an effort to suggest myriadinfluences, dominant tendencies and counter-currents, a maelstrom ofpossibilities that sustains a vigorous culture. It would be foolish to denythat American modern architecture has been a tool of power, and equallyfoolish to see that domination as totalizing, as if change were impossible.The options are never equal, yet the outcome is not predetermined. Ihope that readers will actively engage the broad currents and anomaliesof the past, and then draw upon this legacy to imagine new possibilitiesin the present.


Brooklyn Bridge opening celebration,New York City, 1883,lithograph.

The aftermath of the Civil War has rightly been called a Second AmericanRevolution.1 The United States was suddenly a modern nation, intercon-nected by layers of infrastructure, driven by corporate business systems,flooded by the enticements of consumer culture. The industrial advancesin the North that had allowed the Union to survive a long and violent con-flict now transformed the country, although resistance to Reconstructionand racial equality would curtail growth in the South for almost a cen-tury. A cotton merchant and amateur statistician expressed astonishmentwhen he compared 1886 with 1856. ‘The great railway constructor, themanufacturer, and the merchant of to-day engage in affairs as an ordinarymatter of business’ that, he observed, ‘would have been deemed impos-sible . . . before the war’.2

Architecture helped represent and propel this radical transformation,especially in cities, where populations surged fourfold during the 30 yearsafter the war. Business districts boasted the first skyscrapers. Public build-ings promoted a vast array of cultural pleasures, often frankly hedonistic,many of them oriented to the unprecedented numbers of foreign immi-grants. Real-estate speculators built comfortable apartments andoppressive tenements, while residential suburbs enjoyed a surge ofgrowth within or just outside city limits, touting bucolic pleasures andthe latest conveniences. Chicago’s John Root articulated the challengefor architects: ‘The frankest possible acceptance of every requirementof modern life in all its conditions,’ he wrote, ‘without regret for the pastor idle longing for a future and more fortunate day’.3 Americans lived inthe present, a realm of ever-changing and contested realities.

New technological connections intensified the pace of progress. Localevents could take on national significance almost immediately. Crowdsall over the country shared in the 1869 ‘golden spike’ ceremony thatmarked the culmination of a transcontinental railroad. Ideas, imagesand materials as well as people could now move quickly across the coun-try, encouraging a more unified culture, although regional distinctionsand metropolitan heterogeneity continued to grow apace. The drive for

c h a p t e r o n e

Modern Consolidation, 1865–1893

systemic coordination would affect time itself in 1883 when the railroadsimposed the four standard time zones we know today, supplanting morethan fifty local variants. The telephone would further dissolve spatialbarriers following the first call in 1876 (the centennial year of nationalindependence), eventually connecting all would-be modern buildings.

Linkages could be simultaneously symbolic and practical. Steel sus-pension cables allowed the Eads Bridge (1874) to traverse the MississippiRiver at St Louis. Young Louis Sullivan ‘followed every detail’, finding theideal modern ‘man in his power to create beneficently’.4 A decade later,New Yorkers celebrated the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, a fusion ofsteel cables and neo-Gothic piers that unified two cities into boroughsof what had now become the nation’s premier city. Celebrants touted thebridge as a beacon for immigration, a tourist attraction, an engineeringmarvel. They audaciously asked: ‘Will New York Be the Final WorldMetropolis?’ The critic Montgomery Schuyler called this ‘gossamerarchitecture’ the leading monument of the age precisely because it wasnot a palace or a place of worship, but ‘an exquisite refinement of utilityin which the lines of forces constitute the structure’.5 Electricity trans-formed spaces, too, with urban crowds drawn by the dazzling lights ofsome streets and urban entertainment venues, fuelled by Edison’s cen-tral power stations. Electrified public streetcars transported a new socialcategory, the middle class, beyond the city limits.

Inexpensive media saturated America with images of these and otherspectacles. Pictures and texts about architecture attracted the generalpublic and all manner of competing producers. American Builder andJournal of Art (founded in 1868) was joined by Carpentry and Building(1870), American Architect and Building News (1876), Chicago’s icono-clastic Inland Architect (1883), Architectural Record (1890), NationalBuilder (1885) and scores of others. Family magazines like Scribner’s andScientific American also analysed the latest trends. Pattern books byarchitects and builders offered multiple house designs, urging readers toalter and combine the suggestions as they saw fit. This coverage was partof a larger phenomenon: the advent of postcards, comic strips, amateurphotography and omnipresent advertising. If the national appetite forcommercial illustrations elicited fears among the elite that populariza-tion would subvert the standards of fine art, the population as a wholedelighted in the visual stimulation that surrounded them everywhere.

The architectural profession acquired its modern structure duringthese years of cultural maelstrom. The Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology offered the nation’s first professional classes in 1865, and tenother schools followed in the next two decades, dispersing professionaltraining beyond the East Coast. The scene remained cosmopolitan since

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German, British and Irish architects continued to wield considerableauthority across the country, and ambitious Americans still studied inEurope, most often at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Anyone couldcall himself an architect, so a resuscitated American Institute ofArchitects (aia) joined other professional organizations to ostracizecompetitors and command respect. Licensing exams in the 1890s con-ferred state-approved credentials and gave registered architects exclusiverights over major public buildings. Most professional offices remainedquite small (as they do today), although multiple commissions in a fewfirms required large staffs since corporate clients demanded speed, driv-en in part by steep financing costs. As Daniel Burnham told LouisSullivan in 1874, ‘my idea is to work up a big business, to handle bigthings, deal with big businessmen, and to build up a big organization.’6

Rationalized Business Structures

Rapid expansion and economies of scale fostered concentration of allsorts, beginning with the railroads, then mergers and the emergence of

large corporations – modernity’smost powerful clients and economicarbiters. Businesses large and small,including architecture, calculatedmanagerial practices and profit mar-gins with far greater precision, inpart through ‘process spaces’ to facil-itate more resourceful operations.7

Large-scale producers moved theirclerical and administrative employeesinto downtown ‘headquarters’, awayfrom the gritty world of factories.Up-and-coming companies investedin commercial architecture thattrumpeted prosperity, recognizingthat this could give them a distinctiveedge in a fiercely competitive laissez-faire economy. Insurance companiesand newspapers set the pace, fol-lowed by otherwise conservativebanks, since their growth thrived onfears and excitement about change.In the words of the pre-eminentbusiness historian Alfred Chandler,

Frank Furness,Provident Life andTrust Company,Philadelphia, 1876–9.

1 9 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3

‘Modern business enterprise’ became viable‘only when the visible hand of managementproved to be more efficient than the invisi-ble hand of market forces’.8

New York increasingly stood out, ‘partParadise,part Pandemonium’, in the words of an1868 best-seller; ‘Order and harmony seem[ed]to come out of the confusion.’9 In the 1870s, thetumultuous world of speculative booms andbusts brought thousands of tourists to WallStreet, the ‘engine room of corporate capitalism’,whose ‘Robber Baron’ magnates were bothadmired and despised.10 These circumstancesgenerated the first skyscrapers – still a quintes-sential expression of modernity. A search for‘firsts’ tends to obscure dynamic processes ofappropriation and adaptation, essential to anyinnovation. Nonetheless, many contemporaryhistorians give the prize to New York’s EquitableLife Insurance Building (1867–70), the flagshipof a company less than a decade old whoseassets set a world record in 1868.

The Equitable Building was certainly not a‘proto-skyscraper,’ as some later historians contended, implying a teleolog-ical course towards an inevitable outcome.11 The evolution of its designinstead fused modern concerns for cost-effectiveness with high-risk stakesand publicity. Although one firm, Gilman & Kendall, won a competitionfor the new building in 1867, Henry Hyde, founder and vice-president of thecompany, immediately asked runner-up George B. Post to revise theirscheme, making it ‘rational’ – by which he meant that it should abide by thecost guidelines while providing both higher rents and more rentable space.Post complied in ingenious ways. Most importantly, following Hyde’slead, he incorporated two steam-powered elevators so all floors wouldbe equally valuable. (Elisha Otis had installed the first safety elevator forpassengers a few blocks away in 1857, but it was expensive and clumsy.)

Only eight storeys high, the Equitable reached 43 metres, more thantwice as tall as comparable structures, for Hyde understood both the allureof double-height ceilings and the emergent competition to create thetallest structure. The building enjoyed immediate success when it openedin 1870, drawing thousands of people to ride in the elevators and enjoywhat one newspaper called ‘the most exciting, wonderful, and instructiveview to be had on our continent’.12 Equitable continued to expand,

Gilman & Kendall andGeorge B. Post,Equitable LifeInsuranceHeadquarters, NewYork, 1867–70.

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although the nearby towers of mediagiants like Western Union (designed byPost) and Newspaper Row, congregatedeast of City Hall Park, soon usurped its once-remarkable prominence. Pro-motions for each new set of skyscraperswould continue to tout a fusion ofrational constraints and exceptionalsplendour in costs, height and visibility.

William LeBaron Jenney of Chicagohas been called the father of the sky-scraper. Paternity claims rest on evidenceof iron-skeleton construction – a hiddengenetic code for Modernism – and adesire for legitimate parentage. Thinstructural members support their ownweight and that of the floors; the outerwall hangs on this frame, a curtain of nat-ural light, weatherproofing and orna-ment. Jenney’s Home Insurance Building(1884–5) did use such a system, but onlyon two façades, as an expert committeeascertained in 1931 during the first stage ofthe building’s demolition.13 The skeletonframe evolved through multiple experi-ments on diverse structures, includingJenney’s Fair Building, a departmentstore of 1890–91. Figures like Jenneyreveal changing cultural biases. First seenas archetypal American ‘inventors’, they

fit later historians’ critique of obliging practitioners who merely fulfilledthe will of powerful capitalists.‘The [Chicago] frame was convincing as factrather than as idea,’ Colin Rowe would contend,‘whereas [in Europe] it wasmore often an essential idea before it was an altogether reasonable fact.’14

Astute late nineteenth-century critics like Montgomery Schuylerunderstood that ‘Architectural forms are not invented,’ but evolve inresponse to multifaceted, unpredictable shifts in business, technology andculture.15 Successor generations of modernists instead promulgated mythsof a preternatural creative force, with Chicago akin to RenaissanceFlorence. Siegfried Giedion’s book Space, Time and Architecture (initiallypublished in 1941 and known as ‘Giedion’s Bible’ for decades among archi-tects) acclaimed what soon came to be known as the Chicago School – its

William LeBaronJenney, FairDepartment Store,Chicago, constructiondrawing with column-and-beam detail,1890–91, from theInland Architect andBuilding News.


Modernism incarnate in the ‘constituent element’ of steel-frame construc-tion – and dismissed New York’s towers as signs of frivolous ‘troubadourspirit.’16 This limited vantage highlighted a few remarkable examples asprescient exceptions to the American norm. They supposedly embodiedthe Zeitgeist of their age because they anticipated later preferences. Thesejudgements denied legitimacy to most other structures, erasing them fromconsideration. Architectural debate is still burdened by the narrow opposi-tions that resulted from this purview: lonely exceptions versus evolvingnorms, modern versus eclectic, progressive versus backward, pure spiritversus contaminated amalgams.

Skyscrapers appeared in downtown areas – officially designated ‘cen-tral business districts’ – where economic concentration and social prestigecombined with high property values. Downtown is a distinctly Americanword and concept that originated in the 1880s, in clear contrast to the dis-persed and variegated commercial districts of Europe. (The term down-town only appeared in dictionaries in the early 1900s after several decadesof widespread colloquial use.) Spatial concentration intensified as morecompanies demanded proximity to legal, financial and other services,causing the price of real estate to increase dramatically, which thenencouraged owners to expand vertically. Venturesome investors antici-pated future concentrations since the locations and boundaries of eachcity’s downtown were highly volatile, especially in early years.

Chicago gained prominence when its commercial leaders rebuiltquickly after the devastating fire of 1871, despite an ensuing economicdepression. The new downtown was known as the Loop, taking its namefrom the surrounding cable-car tracks, re-inscribed by elevated trains inthe late 1890s. To this day, all major transit lines still lead to this area,even though its prominence has declined markedly since the 1920s. TheLoop was concentrated, occupying a 1.3-square-kilometre area, hemmedin by water and railroad yards. Crowds and congestion were seen asassets, evidence of a vigorous economy. Tourist guidebooks promoteditineraries of Chicago’s new skyscrapers, touting it as the world’s mostcharacteristically modern metropolis, the ‘City of Speed’.

Two Boston developers, Peter and Shephard Brooks, helped defineChicago’s modernity. By the turn of the century they had financed 9.3square kilometres of new office space, together with Owen Aldis, theirlocal manager. Combined with the other buildings that Aldis managed,this accounted for nearly one fifth of the Loop. Peter Brooks explainedhis specifications for the Monadnock Building (1884–91) to his architect,John Root: a marginal site required masonry construction to reassureclients, while economy and maintenance meant ‘no projecting surfacesor indentations . . . everything flush, or flat and smooth with the walls’.

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Root’s alchemy turned these constraints into creative architecture. Sheerwalls of deep brown brick rise sixteen storeys. The building’s effectdepended solely ‘on its massiveness and the correct relation of its lines’,marvelled one local newspaper, and Schuyler described it as an essence,‘the thing itself ’.17 Unfortunately, elegant minimalism is notoriouslyexpensive, and cost overruns were one reason that Aldis hired anotherfirm, Holabird & Roche, for an addition two years later.

Technological innovations provided essential underpinnings for themodern skyscraper. Some went far below ground. Power-operated der-ricks made deeper foundations possible; pneumatic caissons allowedbuildings to rise to more than twenty storeys high in 1890 – at which

Burnham & Root,Monadnock Building,Chicago, 1884–91,with Holabird &Roche addition of1893 at left.


time Chicago and other cities began imposing height limits. Elevatorswere prominent, but hidden systems of sewage, heating, ventilation andplumbing were equally important, while advances in non-combustiblematerials and sprinkler systems eased fears about fires. Whereas largeoffice buildings of the 1850s had housed some 300 employees, new sky-scrapers might have 4,000 with several times that number of businessvisitors per day. By 1890 the sequence of experimental construction pro-cedures had coalesced into a pattern, still much the same today,including general contractors with comprehensive schedules. Designedto be replicated, the ‘Chicago system’ took root in Kansas City,Cleveland, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Major changes in communications and record-keeping spurred asometimes desperate demand for skilled employees. Small offices accord-ingly gave way to larger spaces and movable partitions. Business, onlyrecently an entirely male domain, now rapidly feminized, in part becauseof pay disparities that continue today. New equipment like typewriters,telephones and vertical filing cabinets helped generate a female clericalforce whose members became interchangeable elements arrayed in rowsin large central areas under the scrutiny of male managers.18

If office efficiency and rentability determined interior design, bothrequired access to natural light. Burnham and Root’s headquarters forthe Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (1883) introduced spaciouslight courts within large perimeter blocks. Chicago’s Reliance Buildingtransformed the office façade, converting most of its surface to plateglass. The fourteen-storey building was erected in two stages. John Rootdesigned the ground floor (1890–91) with capacious windows set in dark

Female and maleemployees in theMetropolitan LifeInsurance Building,New York, c. 1896,postcard.

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masonry; Charles Atwood, who replaced Root after his death, conceivedthe upper floors (1894–5) quite differently, using glazed terracotta aroundample ‘Chicago windows’ consisting of tripartite bays with smaller oper-able sashes to each side. Commentators of the era disliked the brightwhite cladding as the embodiment of the ‘money-getting spirit of theage’. Eighty years later, the Marxist architectural historian ManfredoTafuri concurred, calling it a pure sign of laissez-faire capitalism. Moreformalist critics saw the cladding as a mirage; they read the exterior as atransparent, virtually immaterial glass curtain wall, drawing in part onRoot’s early translations of Gottfried Semper, who had alluded to walls astextiles, and therefore ‘an architectural anticipation of the future’.19

More than ever, Americans now worried that their aggressive busi-ness culture might have negative repercussions, not just on architecturebut on the larger social order. Louis Sullivan was not alone in asking:‘How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal

D. H. Burnham & Co.,Reliance Building,Chicago; base by JohnRoot, 1890–91; upperfloors by CharlesAtwood, 1894–5.


agglomeration, this stark staring exclamation of eternal strife, the gra-ciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture?’20 Ornamentseemed an antidote, articulating higher cultural values over bottom-linefrugality, especially when the public could see it. The incised granitebases of skyscrapers reasserted human scale and even a civic presence onbusy downtown streets. Grand entrances invited the public into hand-some lobbies and interior courts where light filtered through the filigreearound stairs, cantilevered balconies and elevator cages.

Sullivan himself insisted on synthesis, fully integrating rich coloursand ornament (derived from studies of nature and geometry) in his elo-quent office buildings. Three of Adler & Sullivan’s masterpieces areoutside Chicago: the Wainwright in St Louis (1890–91), the Guaranty inBuffalo, New York (1894–5) and the Bayard in New York City (1897–8).The Wainwright, fully ten storeys high, was the firm’s first steel-framestructure. Sullivan claimed to have created the initial ‘logical and poeticexpression’ for skyscrapers in a ‘volcanic’ moment of inspiration.Celebrating verticality, making ‘every inch a proud and soaring thing’, hetransliterated the classical concept of a tripartite column of base, shaft

George Wyman,Bradbury Building,Los Angeles, 1890,light court.

Adler & Sullivan,Wainwright Building,St Louis, Missouri,1890–91.

Wainwright Building,plan of sixth (typical)and first floor.


and capital into monumental scale: a tall, handsome base with publiclobby, ‘an indefinite number of stories’ for office rentals, and mechani-cal equipment at the top, concealed behind a frieze whose vibrantpattern was visible from the street.21 The lush ornament counterbal-anced the elemental structure, providing a ‘life force’, which, Sullivanbelieved, could neutralize the oppressive forces of capitalism. Famouslydeclaring that ‘form ever follows function’, he considered lyricism a fun-damental human need, especially in a crowded, often alienatingmetropolis. His was a ‘liberal, expansive, sumptuous’ Modernism, bring-ing joy to ‘the daily life of our architecture’.22

Industrial architecture also favoured functional beauty, although,given constant changes in use, adaptability was far more important thanvisibility. Urban manufacturing surged in the 1870s and ’80s as small-scale capitalists built hundreds of structures typically known as lofts,renting out each floor for storage or small-scale industry, notably gar-ment sweatshops. Larger companies soon hired well-known architectsto provide more specialized functions and aesthetic impact, notably inurban wholesaling, which dwarfed retail in economic and architecturalterms throughout the 1890s. Marshall Field’s wholesale store in Chicago(1886), designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, became an icon. Theheadquarters for a prestigious business, its exterior majesty and internalorganization provided a stable point of reference not just for architectsbut also for merchants and shopkeepers throughout the region.Architects in other cities often emulated this example for relatively inex-pensive warehouses, sturdy enough to support heavy loads, their

H. H. Richardson,Marshall FieldWarehouse, Chicago,1886.

Harry Wild Jones,Lindsay BrothersWarehouse,Minneapolis,Minnesota, 1895,upper-level addition1909; photographedin 1990 followingrenovation as RiverWalk lofts.

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handsome restraint considered ‘a wholesome architectural influence’ atthe time.23 A century later, many of these handsome buildings were con-verted into high-status residential lofts.

Housing the Emergent ‘Middle Class’

The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted expressed pleasure inanother geographical shift of the post-Civil War era, one that separated‘compact and higher buildings’ in business districts from ‘broader, lower,and more open building in residence quarters’ beyond the city limits.Industrial Chicago (1891) likewise praised the 1880s for the new commer-cial style downtown and the ‘modern cottages’ going up outside the city.24

Olmsted and Vaux’s 1868–9 design for Riverside, just outside Chicago,created the first large-scale comprehensive design for a residential sub-urb.25 Unlike patrician suburbs of the 1850s such as Llewellyn Park,Riverside used skilful site planning to integrate natural beauty with mod-ern technology – notably the inclusion of public transit with a railroadstation – together with adjacent shops and apartments. Almost half of the650 hectares comprised dedicated public land, ensuring a lush bucolic

Frederick LawOlmsted with WilliamL. B. Jenney,Riverside, Illinois,1869, site plan.


setting. William LeBaron Jenneybecame chief architect and engi-neer after 1870, designing a numberof eclectic houses and a hotel. LikeOlmsted, he was an environmentalstrategist, gearing each building tonear and distant views. Frank LloydWright’s Tomek House (1907) andCoonley House (1908) in Riversidewould reinterpret this tradition in adaring new idiom.

The Riverside typology was aneloquent ideal that few couldafford to match. Less expensivestreetcar suburbs attracted a mid-dle-income market – indeed theyhelped create the middle class.Antebellum society had presumedunchanging categories (the ‘vicious’

poor, ‘hard-working’ mechanics or farmers, the elite ‘best men’), givinglittle thought to a vague entity sometimes called the ‘middling classes’.The American designation ‘middle class’ emerged in the 1870s, markinga heightened awareness of status among the fast-growing ranks of serv-ice employees, clerks and professionals. If class depended on job andsalary, the right house converted these into a visible commodity.Although most people still rented, home ownership rose as banks andbuilders offered better mortgage terms. A more informal marketemerged for ambitious working-class families with ethnic-based build-ing-and-loan societies underwriting workers’ cottages in Polish,German and other enclaves close to urban industrial zones.26

Suburbia embodied and exaggerated the idea of separate genderspheres, supposedly protecting women and children from the brutalmale world of commerce and industry. Yet here, too, we find alternativecurrents. Intent on modernizing this female realm, in 1869 CatharineBeecher published The American Woman’s Home, co-authored with hersister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A former art teacher, Beecher adapted sev-eral dwelling types ‘with the latest and most authentic results of scienceapplicable to domestic life’. She focused almost obsessively on her sub-urban model. It featured two full bathrooms, built-in furnishings,movable partitions and a ‘workroom’ that concentrated plumbing,heating and storage in a compact service core.27 In defining the home asa virtually autonomous setting, the shrine of health and efficiency,

Edmund Quincy, Jr,and Ware & VanBrunt, Model Housesfor the QuincyGerman HomesteadAssociation, Dedham,Massachusetts, 1871.

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Beecher endorsed what would later be called ‘family values’. Her idealhome was strictly separated from the work of business, although notfrom work as such, at least not for women. Giedion and others have por-trayed Beecher’s ideas as premonitions of 1920s Modernism. In fact, herremarkable scheme highlights an intriguing aspect of Victorian culture,Modernism’s bête noire. The widespread appeal of Victorian homes,then and now, is in part their ability to symbolize deep human longingsfor familial and personal well-being while deftly incorporating the latestprovisions for convenience, comfort and health. Builders’ advertise-ments routinely promised ‘a.m.i. – All Modern Improvements’ – orhigher standards for everyday life.

Even today, modern residential architecture in the United States drawson four themes that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The first isnew media. The latest house designs were favourite topics in popular andprofessional journals and early mass-market shelter magazines, whichfocused exclusively on the topic. Second, modern technologies raised

Catharine Beecher,frontispiece and floor plan of a modelsuburban house, from The AmericanWoman’s Home withHarriet BeecherStowe, 1869.


standards for public infrastructure and household comfort. Site planningis third. The Civil War made Americans keenly aware of the ‘environ-ment’ as a potent cultural phenomenon and a prime determinant ofpublic health. Well-to-do suburbs set aside some open space and adopt-ed a regular pattern of curving street layouts that seemed organic. Mostdwellings connected to the outdoors with one or more porches and longverandas that in turn led to lawns or gardens. Finally and most pro-nouncedly, American dwellings linked individualization withstandardization. Mass-market commerce still relies on surface images ofindividuality, illusions of autonomy fused with predictable uniformity.

The post-Civil War era marks the birth of that entrenched Americanbelief that your home expresses who you are. Whereas antebellum domes-tic architecture had stressed collective standards (variations were based onclimate and class), American houses now accentuated self-expression.Street façades and interiors mixed materials in distinctive, eye-catchingpatterns, while irregular massing supposedly signalled the distinctiveinterests of those inside. In reality, of course, home-builders relied on

mass-market pattern books and popularmagazines for ideas. Clarence Cook, a well-known New York art critic, declared zealouslyin The House Beautiful that ‘there never was atime when so many books and magazineswritten for the purpose of bringing the sub-ject of architecture – its history, its theory, itspractice – down to the level of popularunderstanding as in this time of ours.’28

Equally important, stock fixtures and fac-tory-made ornament allowed builders toconjure up the effect of uniqueness at a rea-sonable price. As American mass productionreached unprecedented output, it churnedout the appearance of personalized diversityfor dwellings, a precursor to contemporarybuilding practices. Only a quarter of mostsuburban households in 1890 owned theirown homes (and half of these were ownedby mortgage-financing institutions), makingappearance all the more important an indi-cation of status and stability.

‘Queen Anne’ was the most commonlabel for these variegated, supposedly indi-vidualized houses, although builders and

Factory-producedstair balusters fromUniversal MouldingBook (Chicago, 1871).

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architects borrowed widely from French, Japanese and other English ver-naculars and from their own New England Colonial houses. Theamalgams could be serendipitous or garbled (‘hallucination and morbiddelirium tremors’, fretted Scientific American).29 However, architecturerarely fits into precise categories like pastiche or pure, traditional ormodern. The seductive ease of stylistic labels brings a semblance of orderto the messy vitality of art, science and politics, but it tends to dismiss allsorts of creative work that do not fit into narrow classifications.

Besides, labels are often applied long after the fact. Art historianVincent Scully invented the term Shingle Style in the late 1940s todescribe the rambling, informal houses of the 1880s especially popular inwealthy New England suburbs and resorts. Illustrations underscoredbold, asymmetrical compositions, a continuous flow of ‘natural’ shingles(usually factory-produced) on the façades and a relatively open flow ofspaces inside – each one a stage for special everyday ‘events’. This trendspread all the way to California and is often replicated today. A Frencharchitect in 1886 extolled ‘an audacity which is astounding’, predicting

Joseph CatherNewsom, designsfrom his pattern-book, Modern Homesof California (1893).


that these imaginative yet restrained American houses could ‘lay thegroundwork of a more modern style’.30 Yet Scully was not content todescribe a phenomenon. Taking the rhetoric of the time far too literally,he claimed an inherent and conscious meaning: the incarnation of anAmerican ‘democratic’ spirit.31 Past or present, architects and buildersrarely adhere to stylistic rules, much less mythic cultural imperatives.

Frank Lloyd Wright adapted these ideas for his own home and studioin the Chicago suburb of Oak Park in 1889, when he was just 22 years old.The principal façade features an exaggerated triangular gable atop two

Frank Lloyd Wright,Wright house, OakPark, Illinois, 1889.

The Oak Park Wrighthouse, living-roominglenook.

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bay windows, the whole covered with shingles. This paradigmatic signi-fier of shelter emphasized simplicity, even restraint; it also extendedbeyond the private sphere. Following the tenets of Chicago progressives,especially women reformers, Wright integrated work and family lifeunder one roof. (He also shared a Chicago office with like-minded col-leagues for business meetings and collaborative discussions.) The boldgeometries continued inside, notably his refinement of a conventionalfireplace alcove as a series of interlocked rectangles around an arch. Histreatment of space would become increasingly assured and complex overthe next decade.

Modern systems of production and distribution underlay mostVictorian residential architecture. Domestic production of plate glassafter 1875 led to stock windows to fit stock window-sash. Portable prefab-ricated houses were shipped from contractors, many of them in Chicago,to American homesteads and overseas. Schoolhouses, churches, court-houses, stores and taverns were also available. Most suburban and urbanhouses were constructed in small groups from three or four to twenty ata time, each one quite similar in structure and floor plan, but made toseem distinctive with still commonplace devices like reversing the place-ment of a porch or gable. The 1880s also saw a new breed of builder whodramatically increased the number of dwellings and consolidated apanoply of services. These ‘sub-dividers’ produced advertising; designedand built dwellings; laid out street plans; financed transit systems; and

Advertisement for S. E. Gross’s‘Enterprises’ in theChicago suburbs,1889.


installed landscaping and infrastructure,even when the standards were meagre.San Francisco’s Real Estate Associatesbuilt over a thousand row (terrace) hous-es in one decade. Two architect-brothers,Joseph and Samuel Newsom, producedhundreds of custom-designed dwellings,speculative row-house blocks and elevenpattern books with titles like ModernHomes of California (1893). Samuel E.Gross surpassed everyone, laying outmore than 40,000 lots in 16 towns and 150smaller subdivisions in and aroundChicago between 1880 and 1892. His adsfor houses and neighbourhoods appearedin English and foreign languages, usingcomic-strip art to assert the enduringdeveloper’s promise: happiness and pros-perity in ‘your own home’.

Meanwhile, apartment buildings were setting off a ‘Revolution inLiving’, declared the New York Times in 1878.32 Large cities soon reportedthousands of multi-family residences under construction every year,spurred by the rising cost of land. Working-class areas had distinctive pat-terns, such as New York’s ‘walk-ups’ and New England’s ‘triple-deckers’,with one family to a floor, though renters and boarders were common.Apartment houses could be ‘cheap flats’ or more prestigious ‘French flats’,so locations and façades had to ensure status. Interiors were visiblyornate, sometimes awkwardly so, but certain forms of convenience werean asset. By the 1880s, architects were experimenting with innovativeplans and technological advances such as gas lighting, elevators, centralvacuum-cleaning systems, telephone switchboard operators, central hot-water heating and that American obsession, fully equipped bathrooms,for every unit. Apartment-hotels upped the ante with centralized serviceslike professional laundries and kitchens to service individual units, as wellas dining rooms, cafés and reception areas on the main floor. Progressivebuildings added childcare and kitchen-less units. The feminist CharlottePerkins Gilman called this a boon for women, a model of cooperative liv-ing, proof that Americans were willing to innovate, always ready ‘to throwaside good for better, and better for best’.33

Apartment buildings thrived by transforming the image of multi-unit housing from poverty to luxury. The New York courts helped,ruling in 1878 that collective services distinguished apartment houses

Section of plumbing in a typical Chicagoapartment house, c. 1890.

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from tenements, since no one dared suggest ‘communistic’ efficienciesfor the poor. Philanthropists constructed suburban enclaves and a few‘model tenements’ in cities. Both kinds of reforms were relatively con-servative, based on small interventions, not grand architectural‘solutions’. The site planning did make a difference, however, since largeparcels of land allowed for spacious central courtyards to maximize sun-light, fresh air and common areas for the residents.34 These effortsmerged belief in the market with environmental determinism – thenotion that good or bad environments directly affect human behaviour– an especially deep-rooted conviction in American culture. Modelhousing presumed a twofold effect: better architecture would change thebad habits of both residents and speculative builders.

Public Entertainment

American cities were segregating commercial and residential environ-ments, yet urban social life retained a dynamic creole mixture. Despitethe fierce antagonisms that divided citizens along class, ethnic and raciallines, all were simultaneously voyeurs and actors in the show. Americanand European scholars studied crowds, hoping to find ways to control

Frederick LawOlmsted, Back BayFens Park and park-way to BostonCommons, 1887 site plan.


the strikes and the ‘mob’ violence of urban riots that intensified in the1880s. Some American reformers built institutions and outdoor spacesto bring people together, seeking to mitigate the tensions and pressuresof modern life. The bustling crowds also spurred entertainment mogulsto create a kaleidoscopic world of commerce and culture with architec-ture to match. The rise of spectator sports provided acceptable outletsfor emotion. The Cincinnati Red Stockings launched professional base-

John Kellum, rotunda ofthe A. T. StewartDepartment Store,Astor Place, New YorkCity, 1862–70.

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ball in 1869, and the spread of teams in the 1880s provided key sites formale camaraderie. These ballparks are still beloved fixtures in nationalimaginaries and collective symbols of hometown pride.

Urban parks accommodated a broad mix of people and pursuits,encouraging amateur sports, various leisure activities and some contactwith what is now designated ‘the Other’. The quintessential example isNew York’s Central Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux in 1857 andunder construction until 1880. Olmsted’s Boston landscapes grew into anetwork of differentiated yet coordinated public spaces, much admiredby European visitors, starting in 1878 with a park in the Back Bay Fensand a proposed parkway to Boston Commons. Olmsted would encom-pass various efforts throughout the entire metropolitan area to create aregional park system known as the ‘Emerald Necklace’ (1890). Designersin Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, San Francisco and other citiesimplemented similar large-scale landscape designs. This integration ofnature and infrastructure, planning and ‘non-planning’, provides thefoundation for today’s ecological architecture and Landscape Urbanism.

The department store was a transatlantic phenomenon, its originsand trajectory almost as elusive as the consumer fantasies it fueled. A. T.Stewart’s Italianate Marble Palace in New York (1846) was a prototype,although the Bon Marché in Paris (1852) was far more inventive in itsiron structure and fantastic displays. Stewart then constructed a grandcast-iron store and, just after the Civil War, a larger emporium furtheruptown. By this time, a congruence of modern conditions was affectingtime, space and desires. National transport systems of roads, waterwaysand railroads moved goods quickly. Business principles like high vol-ume, varied choices and fixed prices, including mark-downs, increasedsales. Lively advertising became omnipresent, heightening both fears andfantasies about class mobility. Marshall Field initiated a concentrationon Chicago’s State Street with his opulent ‘palace’, and an even granderreplacement whose construction began just one day after the 1871 fire.New York also generated a retail district called ‘Ladies’ Mile’. TheCincinnati merchant John Shillito created the country’s largest storeunder one roof in 1878, using James McLaughlin’s design for an iron-skeleton frame to obtain maximum open space for display. Department-store managers claimed their buildings embodied universal progress bydemocratizing luxury.

The scale, space and grandeur of these emporia sought to transformfrugal women into avid shoppers. Consumer culture redefined self-fulfilment in terms of immediate gratification, displacing the earliernational ethic of hard work, thrift and faith. Edward Bellamy’s LookingBackward, a popular utopian novel first published in 1888, imagined


twenty-first-century Boston as a cooperative society of leisure and pleas-ure centred on a vast emporium where the buyer ‘found under one roofthe world’s assortment in whatever line he desired’.35 Most social criticsof the past century have condemned consumerism as insidious seductionthat trapped the masses, although Walter Benjamin, the brilliant com-mentator on modern Paris, recognized the allure of commoditiesintensified by ‘the crowd that surges around them and intoxicates them’.36

Some theorists now argue that consumer culture can be liberating as wellas manipulative, allowing people, especially women, to imagine alterna-tive possibilities for their lives. People do take pleasure, albeit fleeting, inthe exhilarating aura that pervades shopping environments.

Nineteenth-century department stores provided fantasy settings forwomen and direct contact with goods unimaginably more luxurious thanthe simple products they had only recently made themselves. The combina-tion was intentionally irresistible. Tantalizing entries proclaimed an open-access policy, welcoming the ‘shawl trade’ of immigrant women as well asthe upper-tier ‘carriage trade’. (The working-class protagonist of TheodoreDreiser’s 1900 novel, Sister Carrie, loved ‘the delight of parading here as anequal’.)37 Once inside, women discovered a wonderland focused aroundcathedral-like rotundas that featured spectacular displays and concerts.Open balconies ascended upward, crowned by brilliant stained-glass sky-lights. The grand emporiums also provided safe and comfortable places forfemale customers to rest and recuperate in ladies’ restrooms, lounges, tea-rooms and nurseries. Shoplifting may have been inevitable given the entice-ments for immediate gratification of one’s desires, but surveillance couldnot break the illusion that miraculous transformations were within any-one’s reach. So the grand stairways and balconies proved doubly useful,drawing customers further into a seemingly magical realm while allowingfor discreet monitoring. For good or bad, this modern building type pro-vided intense, if ephemeral, spectacles, fusing private desires and publicspace, an amalgam that is now difficult to dissolve.

Window systems were crucial in department stores, as in other kindsof modern architecture. Upper-level offices and shopping floorsrequired maximum light to supplement the central skylights. Street-level ‘show windows’ were a more complex transitional realm geared toa new pastime dubbed ‘window shopping’. Early displays that exhibitedproducts for sale were soon eclipsed by dream-like settings that encour-aged a suspension of disbelief. Architects experimented with new typesof plate glass to eliminate reflections, making the barrier virtually invis-ible yet solid, while a new breed of design specialist, the window-dresser,conjured up magical micro-environments. The most famous of thesewas Chicago’s L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz (1900).

Adler & Sullivan,Schlesinger andMeyer DepartmentStore (today CarsonPirie & Scott),Chicago, 1891–4,1903–4.


Perhaps the most alluringAmerican department store of theera was Sullivan’s Schlesinger andMeyer (1891–4, 1903–4) in Chicago(now Carson, Pirie, Scott). Theshow windows set innovative, non-glare glass in prismatic boxes, whilethe ornamentation at street level isthe most exuberant of Sullivan’sentire career, culminating in a lush,sumptuously curved corner entry.Giedion’s photographs in Space,Time and Architecture ignored thisstreetscape to show only the spareChicago windows above, so that gen-erations of young architects stoodoutside, asking where to find thismodern masterpiece.

Popular entertainment exemplifiedthe technical prowess and pyrotech-nic allure of late nineteenth-centuryAmerican modernity. Small-town‘opera houses’ proliferated with livelyfare that might combine Shakespeareand Verdi with burlesque. Urbanpleasure gardens, vaudeville theatresand dance halls presented lively offer-ings for diverse audiences. Women ofall classes and backgrounds enjoyed

greater freedom at night in cosmopolitan cities. Every neighbourhoodhad bars and brothels, but also scores of more respectable settings. Manyfacilities were geared to immigrants, who typically separated the proprietyof ‘family audiences’ from prostitutes and saloons (sometimes relegatedto another floor or wing rather than eliminated). ‘Dime museums’exhibited curiosities, while grand art and natural-history museums dis-played masterworks. New York’s innovative new theatres spurred the firstlegends of Broadway with visual spectacles that relied on technologies –electric footlights, complex backstage components for quick changes ofscenery, mechanical systems for retractable roofs and light shows – alltypically left exposed for ease of work.

Impresarios soon thought of uniting this variety of activities andaudiences in huge palladiums. P. T. Barnum had already converted the

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Francis Kimball andThomas Wisedell,Madison SquareTheater, New YorkCity, 1879–80, back-stage technology andelectric footlights.

abandoned railroad depot at New York’s Madison Square into a GreatHippodrome for horse-shows, concerts, religious revival meetings andhis own circus when he proposed a grand mixed-use coliseum calledMadison Square Garden for the site in 1879. Almost a decade later, aninvestment syndicate appropriated the term and chose McKim, Mead& White to create a ‘Palace of Amusements’ with a hippodrome, concerthalls, dance halls, theatres, restaurants, baths, a sports amphitheatre, anexhibition hall and outdoor pleasure gardens. The main structure openedin 1890, the roof garden two years later. In the March 1894 issue of CenturyMagazine Mariana van Rensselaer proclaimed that ‘nothing else would beso sorely missed by all New Yorkers.’38 That possibility seemed preposter-ous at the time, but high upkeep costs led to the Garden’s demolition in1925. Only the name survives today, an empty signifier attached to amammoth but sterile sports arena near Barnum’s original site.

Fortunately, Chicago’s Auditorium Building still stands, though it toohas been threatened. The difficulty of demolishing so massive a buildingsaved its life more than once. Distressed by the anarchist bombing atHaymarket Square in 1886, the clients, Ferdinand Peck and the ChicagoOpera, insisted that the structure be immune to dynamite. Peck wanted a‘public edifice’ to unite the city with varied amenities, drawing multipleaudiences ranging from national political conventions to subsidized concerts for workers. Begun in 1887 and, like Madison Square Garden,completed in 1890, it was the largest structure in the city’s history and the


Adler & Sullivan,Chicago Auditorium,1886–90, sectionthrough theatre.

most costly in the country’s. Peck chose Dankmar Adler and his youngpartner, Louis Sullivan, based on their theatre designs. Given such adaunting commission and a site that filled half a city block, Peck encouraged them to emulate Richardson’s Marshall Field wholesale storefor the exterior. To contrast with the rusticated stone façade, Sullivan cre-ated a pulsating sequence of richly chromatic settings for the interiors,culminating in a glorious theatre. Adler’s skill in acoustics merged withSullivan’s artistic bravura in the ceiling of elliptical arches embellishedwith delicate ornament, hundreds of incandescent lights and openingsfor the ventilation system. Folding ceiling panels and vertical screenscould transform the space from a concert hall of 2,500 seats into a con-vention hall with a capacity of 7,000. Since Peck wanted to make money,he added offices and a hotel to underwrite the civic and cultural spaces.A public observation deck on the roof of the eleven-storey office towerallowed magnificent views of the city. When a building workers’ strikestopped construction throughout the city, the Mayor insisted that theAuditorium, a private development, had ‘a quasi-public nature’, so workcontinued.39

Another extravaganza, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, lefta more controversial legacy. Some 27 million people, half from abroad,marvelled at the spectacle that brazenly proclaimed American superiorityin every realm: technological, social, economic and cultural. Conceivedand orchestrated in just over two years under the direction of one man,Daniel Burnham, and more than 465,000 square metres in area, the‘White City’ won praise as a cohesive ensemble, a vision of harmony in aworld that seemed marred by drudgery and anarchy. Burnham’s aestheticwas decidedly Beaux-Arts. The Exposition was modern in its comprehen-sive planning and its reliance on mass production and new technologies,notably electricity and modern transportation systems like moving side-walks. The broad vision also appropriated the excitement of commercialand popular culture. Burnham himself chose the theatrical impresario SolBloom to oversee the Midway Plaisance, a 1.5-kilometre-long carnival ofexoticism, eroticism and escapism right alongside the grandeur of theWhite City. The Midway featured ethnographic displays, more voyeuristicthan educational, and technological wonders like the first Ferris wheel,which provided unprecedented panoramas of Chicago. Department-storeand railroad executives dominated the committee that presided over theExposition, and they wanted a phantasmagoria of enticing variety, not astatic, moralistic tableau.

Later critics condemned the Chicago Exposition as deceptive andretrograde, largely because of the opulent Beaux-Arts aesthetic thatpredominated. Sullivan’s blistering attack still resounds: ‘The damage

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wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, ifnot longer.’40 This exaggerated prophecy was written in the 1920s, whenSullivan was embittered and impoverished. Such vindictive antagonismharmed American architecture, setting up a battle that privileges thosewho wield the greatest power, such that architects simultaneously dis-miss them and try to usurp their supremacy. Montgomery Schuylerrecognized the broader implications of the Chicago Exposition. Anardent modernist, he lamented the dominant aesthetic as ‘hopelesslyprosaic [and] pedantic’. Nonetheless, it was just a ‘passing show’.Everyone knew that the white plaster surfaces were ‘architectural screens. . . executed on a colossal stage’, for this was ‘a success of illusion’.41

Visitors admired the cohesive planning that brought together hundredsof diverse sites, including Sullivan’s resplendent TransportationBuilding. Official photographs or speeches celebrated a grand imperialvision of American culture, but the experience was richer, more incon-gruous, a mêlée of surprises and juxtapositions.

The spectacular 1893 Exposition died as planned after only sixmonths, though it remains part of the American collective conscious-ness. Its reassuring thematic cohesion persists in many public settings,from historic districts to shopping malls. The scope of Burnham’s con-trol and his corporate values established a significant model for laterurban ‘revitalization’ plans. There are also other more auspicious reper-cussions in our contemporary world: waterfront reclamation and tem-porary spaces for illusory images, fleeting events, participatory per-formances. Can we heed Schuyler’s urbane analysis, rejecting simplebinaries of good/bad, daring to engage a range of alternatives at thesame time? There is something to be learned from the allure of popularsuccess and even historicist fantasies. Surely modern architecture andthought have the strength to engage diverse aesthetic and social worlds?As Schuyler showed so well, tolerance does not mean abandoning critical judgements.


Frank Lloyd Wright,‘A Home in a PrairieTown’, Ladies’ HomeJournal model house,February 1901.

Herbert Croly considered the 1890s a pivotal decade when ‘Americansbegan to realize that their stock of buildings of all kinds was inadequate,or superannuated’. As editor of Architectural Record from 1901 to 1909,Croly called on readers to generate up-to-date building types andassume a new responsibility for directing urban growth. More specifical-ly, they should purge ‘meaningless eccentricities’ from houses andimpose modern standards for urban design, adapted to changing condi-tions while still respectful of surrounding contexts, a synthesis he called‘a nationalization of taste’.1 Croly’s small but influential book, ThePromise of American Life (1909), transferred these ambitions to thenational political scene. He contended that the statesman, the philan-thropist, the reformer and the architect were modern heroes, leaderswhose specialized expertise should command authority. The book helpedlaunch Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912. Two years later, Crolypublished Progressive Democracy, renouncing his earlier demand forexpert control. He now emphasized a very different Modernism based onparticipation, flexibility and ‘curiosity’ about other modes of thought,other ways of life. Croly thus encapsulates the two somewhat contra-dictory aspects of the American progressive movement: elite andstandardized; popular and diffuse.2

The term progressive denotes an aspiration for progress as ameliora-tions, making it virtually synonymous with modern architecture pastand present, orthodox and eclectic. The word was also used for apanoply of American reform movements in the 1890s and early twenti-eth century up through World War One. Croly helped fuse the twotrajectories, as did Frank Lloyd Wright, the social reformer Jane Addams,the philosopher and educator John Dewey, the feminist CharlottePerkins Gilman and many others. American progressivism (the lower-case ‘p’ distinguishes the diverse and vibrant progressive movementfrom Roosevelt’s formal political party) was a form of social democracy,albeit more closely aligned with incremental improvements than withradical politics. Deeply nationalistic and committed to local action,

c h a p t e r t w o

Progressive Architectures,1894–1918

progressive reformers were also internationalists, exchanging ideas withcolleagues across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Theirs was a wide-rangingand pluralistic movement, never unified under one banner. Scholarsemphasize multiple realms of action: structural reform of government;regulations to constrain corporations and industries; social ambitionsfor institutions and public services; moral uplift through nature andreligion; housing reform for all classes.3 Environments provided a sharedleitmotif as visible critiques of what was wrong and alternative proposalsthat were mostly restrained modifications rather than utopian visions,although emotional passions were strong.

Like their European counterparts, fin-de-siècle American progressiveswanted subjective intensity. Feeling stifled by the ‘flatness’ of contempo-rary life, they sought renewal through the ‘vital contact’ of experience inthe world. That experience was often disconcerting. Some responded towhat seemed chaos with cries for rigorous controls. Others abandonedestablished norms and rules, seeking to take account of the incongru-ous, competing and unconscious modes of thought they encountered.Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud provided key theoretical premises, but sodid American thinkers. William James described a belief that resonatedin architecture, declaring: ‘What really exists is not things made butthings in the making.’4

Pragmatism emerged in this context, a distinct though not exclusivelyAmerican philosophy. Conceived as a science, pragmatism sought to dealwith conflicting beliefs and ideas that are continuously evolving, contin-gent upon circumstances, meaningful in terms of actual effects ratherthan elegant abstractions. James expounded a theory of ‘indeterminism… in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene’.Spatially and socially, his ‘mosaic philosophy’ emphasized heterogeneousfringes or patches, potentially linked through an incalculable number ofsuperimposed realities.5 John Dewey, a professor of education at theUniversity of Chicago and then at Columbia, stressed learning throughexperience – what is still called progressive education. The arts played akey role, simultaneously instrumental and experiential in an expandedpublic realm that we today call civil society.6 The acerbic economistThorstein Veblen also viewed aesthetics in pragmatist terms. The Theoryof the Leisure Class (1899) excoriated ‘conspicuous consumption’ amongthe wealthy, not just extravagant opulence but the expensive restraint ofthe arts and crafts as well. Veblen’s masterwork, The Instinct ofWorkmanship (1914), affirmed creativity as a fundamental human drive,increasingly more hybrid and rigid under the forces of modern society.

The city became the principal locus and subject for progressiveAmericans in every realm. The reformer Frederic Howe optimistically

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described the metropolis as an ‘experiment station . . . the hope of thefuture’.7 New York seemed the quintessential modern metropolis.Representations of the city’s architecture destabilized categories such asbeauty and ugliness. Numerous visions of contemporary life tenuouslycoexisted, popular and professional, liberating and oppressive. A self-declared ‘Young Generation’ of writers and artists synthesized the

John Marin, cover forAlfred Stieglitz’smagazine 291 (June1915).

4 9 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8

emerging currents of realism and plasticity to evoke urban life. Painterslike Marsden Hartley wanted to ‘release art from its infliction of the big“A’’’.8 So did John Marin, who trained as an architect and who capturedthe dynamic cadence of skyscrapers that shift and collide like our per-ceptions of them. Photography also rendered the metropolis throughdifferent modalities: the voyeuristic shock of Jacob Riis, the muted inde-terminacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, the human dignity of Lewis Hine.Adapting Dewey’s ideas about the aesthetic dimension of education,Hine sought to convey both what should be respected and what shouldbe changed.9

The polyglot mixture of people in large American cities inspiredyoung artists and intellectuals, even as it disturbed their elders. Between1870 and 1920, some 20 million immigrants arrived in America, princi-pally from southern and eastern Europe. By 1910, one in three Americanswas an immigrant or had a foreign-born parent, more than half in largecities. Extreme poverty in overcrowded immigrant ‘ghettos’ was com-pounded by inadequate municipal services. Nativists demonized these‘aliens’ as a threat to the ‘American way of life’, but others were fascinat-ed by the ‘authentic’ (or enticingly exotic) culture of their street life anddistinctive social institutions.

The wide-ranging essayist Randolph Bourne seized upon immigrationas the basis for a modern national identity. His ‘Trans-national America’

Lewis Hine, baseballin a Boston tenementalley, c. 1909, photo-graph.

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was cosmopolitan and adventurous. Several articles on architectureexpressed the hope that multiculturalism would overturn the ‘culturalcolonialism’ of derivative Beaux-Arts design.10 While most progressivereformers sought better housing and planned leisure activities for ethnicneighbourhoods, Bourne embraced their energy as a ‘New Freedom thatreally liberates and relaxes the spirit from the intolerable tensions of anover-repressed and mechanicalized world’.11 Like other sympathizers, heromanticized what he saw, more concerned about creative inspirationthan actual conditions. And he remained silent about African-Americans.The Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson had establishedthe principle of ‘separate but equal’ facilities, institutionalizing racialinequalities beneath a modern rhetoric of difference.

Another, sometimes overlapping, group of progressives focused onsystematic analysis and objectivity as modern vehicles for change. Theengineer, the professional bureaucrat and the technical specialistembodied a rationalized approach that would soon influence every typeof work and every building. The social sciences coalesced in the latenineteenth century, taking a dominant role in American research uni-versities, businesses and reform organizations. Many scholars testedtheoretical premises in real-life situations, whether factories or urbanneighbourhoods, convinced that rigorous analyses would ameliorate theenvironments they studied; others relied on the subtleties of humanobservation and interaction. Amateurs and professionals alike compiledarsenals of seemingly unbiased visual material including statistics, mapsand documentary photographs, hopeful that evidence would generateboth a public demand for reform and the direction it should take.Architects like Daniel Burnham used such data to venture into city plan-ning, both small ensembles and large-scale schemes sponsored bybusinessmen’s clubs. As John Dewey recognized, there were many kindsof modern education ranging from visual to verbal, from the dictums ofexperts to collaborative exchange.

Progressive-era Americans saw their cities through a kaleidoscope,fractured yet endlessly fascinating. They wanted change and oftenembraced it, but remained cautious about moving beyond descriptivecritiques of what existed. Major architectural innovations occurreddespite all the constraints, mainly outside major cities or on theirfringes. At least initially, the designers were themselves peripheral to theprofession and unknown to one another, although they were involvedwith local and, later, transnational organizations. Some might even beconsidered amateurs, with little or no formal education in architectureschools. As such, they had much in common with the remarkable inde-pendent inventers who dominated the age, men like Thomas Edison and


Nikola Tesla. Clients were equally unconventional, ranging from middle-class families to small businessmen. Popular culture embracedthis work, as much as, if not more than, the professional architecturemedia. This was unquestionably an anomalous Modernism. But it trans-formed home lives, work lives and public lives, not just of Americans butof people around the world.

Systems and Battlefields of Business

Americans recognized momentous transformations in the nature ofwork and the making of products at the turn of the last century.Architecture adapted of necessity to competing demands for more pre-cision and flexibility. The efficiency craze was formalized in the 1910s,under the label of ‘scientific management’ and the name of engineerFrederick Winslow Taylor. A skilled publicist, Taylor focused on work-ers’ efficient, cost-saving movements through space. The simpleprecepts of his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management,inspired an army of disciples who became professional consultants tobusiness and industry, proclaiming Taylor’s maxim that there is always‘one best way’.

Initially focused on industrial production, Taylorism would spreadto every sort of workplace, from offices to homes. Yet Taylor and hiscohorts did not rethink factory architecture. That process began in the1880s when the use of electricity and advances in concrete construction,which led to façades becoming more transparent and interior spaceslarger and less encumbered. In this as in other fields of technologicalexperimentation, early American innovators drew on experience ratherthan formal education as architects or engineers. Factories provided thefirst evidence of change as façades became more transparent and inte-rior spaces larger and less encumbered.

Ernest L. Ransome, an English-born family-trained engineer, seems tohave invented the concrete-frame factory in California in the 1880s,partly in response to the danger of earthquakes, then quickly patented histechnology and designs even as he went beyond them. Ransome’s firstEast Coast commission was the Pacific Borax plant in Bayonne, NewJersey (1898), which attracted considerable attention when it survived ahorrific fire in 1903. Hired that very year for an addition to the plant, hesystematically used concrete to mould floors and columns. He recog-nized that exterior walls, no longer load-bearing, could be transformedinto extensive window-walls that improved safety, quality control andworker morale. Fully conscious of this breakthrough, Ransome heraldedhis ‘Daylight Factory’ as a ‘modern type’ of structure. His best-known

Detail of map showing immigrantethnicities in blocksof West Chicago fromHull House Maps andPapers (1892).


building, likewise from 1903 to 1906, was a larger facility for the UnitedShoe Manufacturing Company in Beverly, Massachusetts. Its starringrole in architectural history came through European validation. Theowner of Germany’s Fagus Shoe-Last Company visited Beverly in 1910 toprocure financing for his venture and, on his return, presented WalterGropius with photographs of Ransome’s building (and of Albert Kahn’sFord plant in Highland Park, Michigan). Both architect and client calledthe 1912 Faguswerk ‘an American factory’.12

New systems changed factory-building, much like the work inside,with a continuous flow of work and a shift from skilled to relativelyunskilled labor. The timber-and-masonry construction of ‘mill-doctors’disappeared as reinforced concrete became standard. Structural break-throughs were in fact adaptations – what came to be called applied (asopposed to theoretical) knowledge. Engineers continuously tested ideasin the field, often in collaboration with university-based materials-sci-ence programmes. Ransome’s protégé, C.P.A. Turner of Minneapolis,invented mushroom-column construction around 1909, unaware ofsimultaneous European experiments by Robert Maillart and FrançoisHennebique. Ransome’s book, Reinforced Concrete in Factory Production(1912), resembled a kit-of-parts more than a treatise on structure. Yetthis approach relied on a concept, a pragmatic mode of questions,experimentation and modifications that can be linked, albeit indirectly,to the work of James and Dewey.

The iconic industrial buildings of the modern era, grain silos andgrain elevators, developed in much the same way. The cylindrical con-

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Ernest L. Ransome,United States ShoeMachinery Companyfactory, Beverly,Massachusetts, 1906,from a Ransome &Smith Co. ad inSystem: The Magazineof Business (1906).

crete form originated near Minneapolis in 1899, initially ridiculed as‘Peavey’s Folly’. (Frank Peavey was an international grain dealer, CharlesHaglin his architect.) It protected produce remarkably well and quicklybecame the industry standard. Meanwhile, American dominance of theworld grain market connected scattered rural storage silos to batteries ofhuge transfer- or terminal-elevators in port cities. The Washburn-Crosby (now General Mills) Elevator in Buffalo was the mostphotographed example. The first structure was built in 1903, the secondin concrete, two years later. European modern architects were awed bythese unintentional monuments yet principally concerned with theirown artful gaze. Erich Mendelsohn wrote of ‘childhood forms, clumsy,full of primeval power, dedicated to purely practical ends’.13 AmericanPrecisionist painters such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler recog-nized the intelligence that underlay this distinctly American buildingtype, but they, too, romanticized the subject, celebrating grain-elevatorsas an expression of a new ‘certainty’ in business and the culture at large.The reality of cultural history lies in between these extremes, cognizantof individual designers and evolving processes, both of which proceed inirregular cadences.

The year 1906 saw two key commissions in the automobile industry:Pierce Arrow’s one-storey factory in Buffalo and Packard’s Building No.10 in Detroit. Albert Kahn, a self-educated German-American, designedthem both, and his brother Julius invented the innovative concrete trusssystem that permitted the long spans. Space opened up, free of obstacles,

maximizing the potential for endlessexpansion and improvements. Henry Fordwas so impressed that he asked Kahn todesign a new facility at Highland Park, asuburb north-west of Detroit. The initialcomplex of eight buildings, commissionedin 1909, was in operation by 1910. The mainstructure, soon known as the Old Shop, wasdubbed the ‘Crystal Palace’ because of itswindow-walls. Ford asked Kahn to combinetwo massive buildings, cover them withglass and consolidate processes inside. Agiant craneway at the centre, set on a mono-rail and connected to the glass roof above,distributed materials. Greater control overlight and ventilation increased equipmenttolerance and therefore output. The factoryitself was now a productive machine.

Bateman & Johnson,Washburn-Crosby(now General Mills)Grain Elevator,Buffalo, New York,1903–5, from ErichMendelsohn’sAmerika (1926).


Ford later identified the salient feature of his approach as ‘System,system, system’.14 Recognizing that systems are never static, he com-missioned a sequence of new types. The six-storey New Shopaccommodated more processes. This interior focused around a glass-roofed, six-storey craneway that ran the entire 257-metre length;railroad tracks below moved everything directly into place for con-tinuous, calibrated production. A single-level plant in 1913 wasspecifically designed for a continuous assembly line – again, less aunique invention than a culmination of preceding experiments. Bythat year Ford had similar assembly plants in other cities. Despitetheir being filled with light and ergonomically advanced, the relent-less control over everyone’s place and movements led to higher ratesof worker turnover.

Ford’s concept of mass production altered workspace, labour condi-tions and consumerism. His plants produced some 6,000 identical

Albert Kahn withErnest Wilby, FordMotor Company,Highland Park,Michigan, 1909–10,in a 1913 photograph.

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Model t cars in 1908, 182,000 in 1913 and 741,000 in 1917 – at an ever-lower price. The system, soon called Fordism, and its concomitantarchitecture spread throughout the world. Kahn’s factories had to bemodern in a new way, anticipating continual expansion, replication andobsolescence. He did not celebrate the iconic modernity of the automo-bile, nor did he claim to design the production system. His was anunmediated and direct response, a series of envelopes tailored to Ford’songoing, almost obsessive advances.

Commercial office buildings faced a related set of issues. The greatmergers of 1895–1904 created the major corporations of the twentiethcentury, names like us Steel, at&t and DuPont. Most of the country’sindustrial base came into the hands of about 50 giant corporationsknown as trusts, which eradicated thousands of small companies. Anational, and soon international, scale of distribution extended toother businesses, notably mail-order companies and service industries.Americans’ attitudes towards big business ranged from awe to outrighthatred, which fed ‘trust-busting’ crusades and critiques of the ‘SoullessCorporation’. Even more than factories, these much larger headquartershad to produce not just efficiency, but a new, more manipulative formof advertising based on the ‘science’ of public relations.

Not surprisingly, the response differentiated interiors from façades.The Chicago-based magazine System, founded in 1900, described interiordesign as a key weapon in the ‘battlefields of business’. Large companiesneeded multiple floors for a network of differentiated tasks. Elaboratecharts and statistical tables organized procedures and people, bringingorder to the vast empires. Scientific managers took the factory as their

Albert Kahn, FordNew Shop, HighlandPark, Michigan,1914–15, factory interior with six stories of cranewayconnectors.


model, assigning hordes of workers to repetitive tasks at specified spotsin huge, open ‘bullpens’ overseen by foremen. Systemization extended tostatus, including gender relations. Some companies with large numbersof female clerks segregated the sexes, as much to ensure orderly workrelations as to show paternalistic concerns for morals. Most relied onrigid specifications for virtually every space and body. Managerial powerseemed dependent on evidence of control, made visible in efficient spa-tial organization and the subordination of office workers as well as thosein factories.

The annus mirabilis of 1906 witnessed an example and a partial excep-tion to this trend: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Buildingjust outside Buffalo (demolished in 1950 to make way for a truck-storagegarage). This was the headquarters for the fast-growing mail-order busi-ness of a soap manufactory. Wright aptly called it both a ‘commercialengine’ and a ‘family gathering’ for the employees, including 1,800 cleri-cal workers.15 He geared the design to specific needs: systematic mailhandling, a carefully coordinated hierarchy and a wholesome image –essential advertising for a soap company. Efforts to maximize efficiencyled to some of the first architect-designed office furnishings. This ode towork converged at the central atrium where the managers sat alongsidetheir secretaries. Twenty-one metres of open space soared above them,flooded with light from a glass skylight. The upper levels opened ontothis majestic volume and connected via half-flights of stairs to an adja-cent annex, creating a complex spatial interweaving. The top floor androof level contained a staff restaurant, conservatory and exercise prome-nade, thus combining services with surveillance.

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Frank Lloyd Wright,Larkin CompanyAdministrationBuilding, Buffalo, NewYork, 1904–06.

Larkin AdministrationBuilding, photographof light court, 1906.

If employee morale supposedly depended on the edifying virtues oforderly work, both management and architect insisted on a pleasantenvironment. Like other advanced workplaces of the era, the LarkinBuilding was sealed off from the outside – a necessity given its pollutedsurroundings consisting of the factory and local rail yards – but Wrightprovided air conditioning. He installed an air-purifying and coolingdevice manufactured in Chicago, then augmented it by placing the air-exhaust units in massive stair-towers at the corners. Wright bridged twokinds of Modernism here, one concerned with pure structure andrationality, the other with ongoing improvements in human comfortand control. As we shall see, he brought this same dynamic synthesis ofinnovations and adaptations to his domestic architecture.

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Willis Polk, HalladieBuilding, SanFrancisco, 1917–18.

Apart from such exceptional buildings, the commercial buildings ofearly twentieth-century American cities can pose a challenge to anyonewith a modernist education. Metal-and-glass façades on smaller build-ings often achieved a lyrical beauty with exterior ornament that obscuredthe ferocity of capitalism and its concomitant innovations. Façades alsofunctioned as advertising, giving a distinctive image (a brand, we mightsay today) to the company. Cass Gilbert’s extravagant WoolworthBuilding in New York City (1911–13) was famously called the ‘Cathedralof Commerce’. Solon Beman’s Studebaker Building in Chicago (1885),both a headquarters and showroom, defined that city’s Automobile Rowfor the next two decades. Large corporations like Singer, Woolworth andMetropolitan Life competed to put their name on the tallest building inthe world.

Willis Polk’s Halladie Building in San Francisco (1918) boasted thefirst large-scale curtain wall, its broad glass panels hung a metre in frontof the structure and bolted to thin concrete slabs. At the time it seemeda ‘frontless building’, possibly dangerous and visibly cheap, especiallysince Polk painted the exuberant ornamental ironwork bright blue andgold to honour the owner, the Regents of the University of California.

Small businesses likewise explored advertisement and public rela-tions. Plate glass and colourful terracotta ornament abounded on MainStreets in large and mid-size towns, even along the new ‘taxpayer strips’of inexpensive temporary buildings geared to automobile traffic. (Theterm meant than owners just wanted to break even on taxes, anticipat-ing more lucrative development in the near future.) Substance was morecrucial for financial institutions. Purcell & Elmslie and Louis Sullivanbuilt handsome banks in small Midwestern towns. Interiors and exteri-ors were striking yet purposefully unostentatious. Sullivan declared thathis banks fostered democratic values, ‘deifying the commonplace’, aswith his adaptation of an industrial material – rough-cut, multi-huedtinted bricks – so luminous that locals nicknamed them ‘jewel boxes’.16

These architects showed a deep faith in their society, but we should nottake them or their clients too literally. Progressive governments in thesestates passed legislation that required banks to invest in their local com-munities and extend credit more liberally. The reforms were not relatedto the transformative power of architecture

The ‘New Woman’ and the Simplified Home

Progressive ideals about the public interest had a potent effect on theprivate realm. A chorus of voices – architects, builders, building-tradesunions, feminists and other reformers – condemned the ‘costly ugliness’,


inefficient construction, insalubrious sanitation and ‘undemocratic’extravagance of Victorian dwellings. Middle-class women wanted toextend their concerns citywide, improving standards for health, com-fort, economy and beauty in all dwellings, a concept known asmunicipal housekeeping. An architecture for ‘rational beings’ would besimpler, standardized, efficient, economical. ‘A busy woman,’ wroteMary Gay Humphries in 1896, ‘says her idea of the house of the future isone that can be cleaned with a hose.’17 Progressive architects neverpicked up on this particular suggestion, but they often talked withwomen’s reform groups and wrote for popular shelter magazines, fol-lowing John Dewey’s belief in ongoing exchange between experts andusers of a similar class.

The ‘New Woman’ was omnipresent, a distinctly American characterwho first emerged in the 1890s, demanding greater economic, social,political and sexual freedom. Such women eagerly embraced modernitywithout abandoning all supposedly traditional comforts or roles,although Harper’s Bazaar did condemn the single-family dwelling as ‘aprison and a burden and a tyrant’.18 The word feminism appeared early inthe century, encompassing various ambitions and desires rather than oneuniform image. Work became a prime issue since almost one in fourAmerican women were earning wages by 1900, whether as servants,labourers, ‘working girls’ or professionals. Many working women had toplan for childcare and other responsibilities – the ‘infrapolitics’ of every-day life, too often invisible in political or social analysis.19 Even those withno outside jobs demanded simpler, more efficient homes to gain extratime for social life and reform. Middle-class domesticity was affected by

Irving Gill, project forMarion OlmstedHouse, San Diego,California, 1911, fromThe Craftsman (May1916).

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overlapping changes. The number of children declined markedly, and thenumber of domestic servants fell by half between 1900 and 1920. Almosta third of the nation’s female population lived alone or with otherwomen by 1910, ‘adrift’ to some observers, ‘self-sufficient’ to others.20

A new profession called home economics or domestic science medi-ated between women, government and the private marketplace. By 1916almost 200 colleges and universities had specialized departments to edu-cate female students as modern specialists, consumers and citizens.Home economists always defined modern homes in the plural, never as‘the modern home’. Three fundamental tenets stood out: private andpublic realms were fundamentally interrelated; household knowledgerelied on biological and social sciences, not fashion; and all kinds ofdwellings needed change, from suburban houses to urban tenements.Several home economists praised the work of Frank Lloyd Wright andhis cohorts.21 The radical feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman leanedstrongly towards simplification, standardization, smooth surfaces andefficient spatial organization. Her 1903 book, The Home: Its Work andInfluence, condemned the ‘myth’ of domestic economy, explaining that‘the more elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit’.22

She also encouraged women to think about cooperative approaches tohousing, housekeeping and childcare, such as the recent introduction ofkindergartens. The striking exception, Christine Frederick, the self-promoting Martha Stewart of her day, promulgated the authoritariantechniques, charts and rhetoric of scientific management. Germanmodernists like Bruno Taut and Alexander Klein would incorporateFrederick’s routing diagrams into their housing texts, drawn to herinsistence on expert definitions of ‘the one best way’ – clearly a referenceto Taylor’s scientific management.23

Health became an aesthetic imperative with the recognition thatgerms caused disease. Housewives now demanded smooth hygienic sur-faces to minimize (and reveal) dust or dirt; every home economistcondemned Victorian woodwork detailing as ‘abiding-places for germs’.The process of elimination extended from a simplified aesthetic to high-er standards for plumbing fixtures. The kitchen and bathroom vied withthe informal living room as the symbolic core of the modern Americanhome. Adolf Loos praised American bathrooms as ‘genuine Modernism’in his 1898 essay ‘Plumbers’.24

Higher, more expensive standards for household technologiesrequired smaller, more efficient plans. Built-in furnishings helped max-imize the small floor area of an average house. Pantries disappeared ascommercial enterprises took over domestic tasks like canning food.Equally important, simplified façades rebuked ostentatious competition


and proclaimed democratic equality as a foundation for mental health.Marion Talbot, a professor at the University of Chicago, sought to makethe home and family ‘effective parts of the social fabric’ both in theDepartment of Sociology and in the city outside.25

The shelter media encouraged similar ideas. Edward Bok, editor ofLadies’ Home Journal, launched a crusade to modernize Americandomestic architecture in the late 1890s. His definition was functional: aliving room to replace the fussy parlour, no ‘senseless ornament’, at leastone bathroom and improved ventilation. This milieu provided the firstopportunity for Frank Lloyd Wright to show his alchemy, converting asimple programme into architectural gold. Wright published the first ofthree houses for Ladies’ Home Journal in February 1901, calling it ‘AHome in a Prairie Town’.26 The design contains virtually every revolu-tionary theme he would employ for the next two decades. While thebuilding seems embedded in its landscape, the massing suggests theremarkable spaces within. Wright and others since likened the effect todynamiting the boxy Victorian home. A similar design was built a yearlater: the Ward Willitts House in Highland Park, Illinois. Unfortunately,the architect could not find a client for the ‘Quadruple Block’ site planin the upper corner of the Journal article, which showed variousarrangements of four uniform houses.

Wright poured most of his energies into small houses and threegrand dwellings: the Martin House in Buffalo (1904), the CoonleyHouse and the Robie House in Chicago (1910). This last, designed for thefamily of a bicycle- and automobile-parts manufacturer, culminated theprocess of abstraction (‘articulation’ in Wright’s terms) that he hadevolved over a decade. The long, narrow, three-storey house sits on acorner lot in the university neighbourhood of Hyde Park, near what hadbeen the Midway in 1893. The horizontal lines of the masonry walls arehigh, screening views of the outdoor rooms and the interior. The entryis hidden away, almost insignificant in the formal composition. Low-pitched roofs reinforce the geometry and tie the house to the ground, asin Wright’s suburban Prairie Houses of this era.

The Robie House interior is startling to this day. The social area ofthe main floor is a free flow of space around the solid mass of the cen-tral fireplace/staircase, which provides a break between the living anddining areas. A separate wing floats quietly to the rear with a guestroom,kitchen and servants’ rooms. The only embellishment is the geometricpatterns of leaded-glass windows and the structural elements them-selves, including vents for the integrated central-heating systemTransverse oak strips in the ceiling hold electric lights, accentuating thesense of technical precision while providing a natural balance. This is

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Frank Lloyd Wright,Frederick C. Robie House,Chicago, 1908–10.

Robie House, main floorplan.

Robie House, living room.

undeniably a modern house – abstract, even slightly anonymous. LikeWright’s other dwellings, it nonetheless maintains a connection withtraditional, almost atavistic ideals of a family shelter, notably in thehearth and the faint allusion to the beamed ceilings of Colonial-erahouses.

Only much later, in his 1931 lectures on modern architecture, wouldWright establish a nine-point statement of principles, crystallizing ideasthat had emerged in his work and in the larger culture. These were: areduction of elements to achieve unity; horizontal planes to integratebuilding and site; elimination of basements to raise houses off theground; spaces defined by screens rather than cellular rooms; windowsgrouped as banks of ‘light screens’; one continuous material for thefaçade and no applied ornamentation, both to highlight ‘the nature ofmaterials’; incorporation of all mechanical features into the architecturalscheme; likewise with built-in furnishings; and elimination of deco-rators in favour of the architect’s total-design concept.27 This listencapsulates the directness that characterized American housing reformof the progressive era, the emphasis on modern processes and effectsmore than aesthetic representation. Despite metaphors that resembledthose of the European Modern Movement – the kitchen was likened toa ‘laboratory’, a ‘surgery’, a ‘domestic factory’ – there was no demand forseverity. Wright challenged conventional American ideas about domes-tic space without trying to disturb the eye or disrupt the harmony ofsocial relations. That would change when he abandoned first his familyand Oak Park and then the harmonies of the Prairie House for the moreradical clime of the Southwest and California.

Eclectic northern California began to capture the public imaginationin the early twentieth century. Bernard Maybeck helped launch what thehistorian Lewis Mumford would later call the First Bay Area Style, ajoyful Modernism that freely mixed local vernaculars with Japanese andEuropean influences, native redwood with industrial materials, compo-sitional order with quirky details. The micro-ecology of this area,distinctive both climactically and culturally, encouraged a cult of well-being through aesthetic restraint and closeness to nature. CharlesKeeler’s The Simple House (1904) affected Maybeck (who built Keeler’shouse) and colleagues such as Ernest Coxhead, Lillian Bridgman, WillisPolk and Julia Morgan. John Galen Howard was so adamant aboutprocess that he only gave client and crew foundation plans; he designedday by day, testing his ideas, integrating interior with exterior, familiar-ity with innovation. Drawing on Bergson and James, he saw modernhouses ‘in the making’, activated by the memories and possibilities ofhuman lives.28

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Southern California proved equally fertile. The brothers Charles andHenry Greene fused East and West in their virtuoso designs, notably theGamble House in Pasadena (1908), with its crescendos and pianissimosof woodwork, light and landscape. Irving Gill preferred plain, asymmet-rical walls of poured concrete or tilt-up panels, enlivened with cubicshapes and bold geometric openings. His designs eliminated super-fluous detail while retaining a palpable sense of grace, the result ofdeference to local traditions and a respect for economy. Iridescent inte-rior tints made even small rooms seem ‘like living in the heart of a shell’.Interiors showed Gill’s strong feminist sympathies with innovative plansand smooth surfaces to achieve ‘the maximum of comfort . . . with theminimum of drudgery’.29 Commissions ranged from the magnificentDodge House in Los Angeles, sadly demolished in 1970, to modestworkers’ dwellings. Gill’s favourite work was Bella Vista Terrace or LewisCourts, a group of low-cost dwellings built in 1910. In projects large orsmall, grand or spartan, his site plans synthesized public and privateoutdoor areas, while the simple ‘sanitary’ dwellings boasted labour-sav-ing devices as well as simplified forms.

Three popular trends helped disseminate modern ideas and aestheticsamong a broad swath of architects, builders and clients. The first was pre-fabrication, including pre-cut (or ‘Ready-Cut’) houses for mail-ordercompanies. Builders and architects, too, designed limited repertoires oftypologies with distinctive façades to disguise the standardization such asFrank Lloyd Wright’s designs for the American System-Built HousesCompany in Milwaukee from 1915 to 1917. Factory managers and homeeconomists also provided labour-saving innovations. When Sears,Roebuck & Company added houses to its well-known catalogue in 1908,

Irving Gill, LewisCourts, Sierra Madre,California, 1910.


the enthusiastic response generated a special publication, Sears’ ModernHomes, published from 1909 to 1937. By 1939 Sears claimed that over100,000 families were living in their homes. This prefabrication relied ona national transportation infrastructure, advertisements in the nationalmedia, centralized industrial production and a radically simplified, stan-dardized yet familiar aesthetic.30

The second trend came from Gustav Stickley, a furniture designer,whose magazine, The Craftsman, published from 1901 to 1916, featuredmoderate-cost dwellings with simplified elements and local materials.Committed to the socialism and artistic principles of William Morris,Stickley pressed Arts and Crafts ideals about visible evidence of crafts-manship, especially that of carpenters and masons. All the same, hecautiously incorporated industrial techniques to reduce the cost of housesfor average Americans. The Craftsman published work by architects suchas Gill and Sullivan, as well as by builders and ingenious amateurs.Another ardent feminist, Stickley encouraged women professionals whilehis articles stressed ease of maintenance and fluid connections within thedwelling. The Craftsman house ideal spread beyond the magazine andStickley’s short-lived empire.

Third was a type: the bungalow, a comfortable minimal dwelling (usu-ally one or one-and-a-half storeys and under 75 square metres), especiallypopular from 1900 to the 1920s. Here, too, the media played a role, from thearchitectural press to scores of popular plan books, magazines and evensongs from Tin Pan Alley, as New York’s Broadway came to be called. Thisearly global trend made its way from India to Australia, Britain and the us

‘A Craftsman LivingRoom’ from TheCraftsman (October1905).

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Sylvanus B. Marston, StFrancis Court, Pasadena,California, 1909, perspec-tive with floor plans.

Walter Burley Griffin,houses in Trier CenterNeighborhood,Winnetka, Illinois,1913, drawing byMarion Mahoney.

in the 1880s, first as vacation homes on the East Coast, then as moderate-cost mass housing in California. Builders and architects alike were pleasedwith the potential new market. Distinguishing characteristics included alow-pitched overhanging roof, a front porch with rather hefty supportsand abundant built-in furnishings. As both the word and the basic conceptswept the country in the 1910s and ’20s, regions from Seattle to Chicago toFlorida evolved their own distinctive variations.

Site planning posed quite a challenge for small houses, which lookdwarfed and out of place along conventional residential streets.Residents sometimes wanted to emphasize shared social activities. TheLos Angeles architect Sylvanus Marston was the first to group bungalows

Grosvenor Atterbury,Forest Hills Gardens,Queens, New York,1909–12, precast concrete panels beinglifted into place.

Forest Hills Gardens,concrete-panel houses with neo-Tudor ornament and a recent third storeyaddition, photo-graphed in 2007.

off the street around a courtyard. His St Francis Court in Pasadena(1909) combined eleven small houses around a central court to addressproblems of landscaping, standardization and scale, while he providedcollective space. This arrangement spread quickly. Arthur and AlfredHeineman began a series of courts within a year, radically increasingthe number of houses per hectare. Bungalow courts with communitybuildings were especially popular among single women.31 Ingeniousmodifications included double bungalows with sliding doors betweenthe living rooms so residents could create a larger joint space when(and if) they wished to. Architects of middle-class subdivisionsexpanded on the bungalow-court idea with far more spacious grounds.Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney did several such groupingsin the Midwest. They encouraged collective ownership of land, inpart out of political conviction, in part to ensure concern for thelandscape.

Working-class housing reform likewise integrated individual andcollective settings. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francisco Terrace in Oak Park,completed in 1895 for the philanthropist Edward Waller, focusedaround a courtyard. Grosvenor Atterbury’s Forest Hills Gardens(1909–12) relied on a site plan by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr, to mixapartment buildings, attached houses and single-family dwellings. TheRussell Sage Foundation subsidized this model workers’ suburb in theNew York borough of Queens. Atterbury’s efforts to strike a balancebetween domestic symbolism and economy led to an experimental sec-tion using pre-cast concrete panels lifted into place with a crane; hethen tacked on neo-Tudor detailing to soften or re-familiarize therather spare aesthetic. American minimalism thus recast the idea ofarchitectural honesty, acknowledging the truth of ambivalent humandesires rather than insisting on pure structural expression. The markettriumphed over good intentions, however, when enthusiasm for thehigh-quality design priced workers out of this middle-class haven.

Mutual Education and Fantastic Recreation

Public buildings of the ‘Gay Nineties’ and early twentieth century provid-ed another form of advertising, a celebration of collective spirit that useddynamic modern forms and technologies. Local communities sometimesinitiated the effort. When St Louis proposed neighbourhood centres inaddition to a City Beautiful civic centre, Henry Wright’s 1907 prototypeincluded a library, fire/police station, settlement house, model tenementand public market complex. One such example survives in the Czechworking-class neighbourhood of Soulard.32 Nothing, however, matched


the potential of Frank Lloyd Wright’s brilliant 1913 proposal for a modelsuburb outside Chicago. Wright used a sequence of parks and play-grounds near the centre to weave together a rich assortment of modernpublic buildings. His specifications included a school, library, gymnasium,theatre, cinema, art museum and ‘a domestic science group’. Thisindoor/outdoor complex provided a common ground for residents fromdifferent social classes and house types, ranging from spacious single-family dwellings to small two-family workers’ houses and apartmentbuildings for single people near the public-transit station. The pro-gramme brief had not asked for this mix of incomes and house types, norfor the assortment of activities. They signalled Wright’s deep and abidingcommitment to social landscapes, a critical though never realized contextfor his virtuoso private dwellings.

The Chicago City Club had initiated the ideas competition that led toWright’s proposal. (His was a non-competitive entry, since, heexplained, he was otherwise bound to win.) Like other civic groupsaround the country, the City Club sponsored discussions, exhibitionsand various projects to enhance the public realm. Public baths, libraries,gymnasia, schools and parks appeared in cities and small towns.Women’s clubs were especially active, and, while their facilities were usu-ally quite traditional in appearance, modern buildings sometimesmatched the cosmopolitan purpose that defined the early century. Theseclubs offered an important place for businesswomen to socialize. Theprogrammes usually extended more broadly, including special resi-dences for working women of different classes, notably Chicago’sEleanor Clubs. Julia Morgan built hundreds of clubs and collective resi-dences for the ywca and Emanuel Sisterhood, as well as women’s hotels,hospitals and nursing homes.33

Frank Lloyd Wright,model suburb for theoutskirts of Chicagodesigned for theChicago City Club,1913.

Hazel Waterman,Wednesday Club, SanDiego, California,1910–11.


Churches, too, explored new social and artistic agendas. The progres-sive movement re-energized American Protestantism, infusing manycongregations with a sense of worldly responsibility. Evangelical ‘audito-rium churches’ in large cities provided a precedent for today’smega-churches with their large-scale, dramatic interiors for charismaticministers together with adjacent social rooms, sports facilities, and lec-ture halls for outreach programmes among the working classes. Smallsuburban churches struck a more restrained liberal chord in liturgy andsometimes in architecture. Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park (1905–8)is concrete, cubic and rather stark, uncannily similar to the LarkinBuilding. The interior spaces surprise us with their visual and emotion-al intensity. The spare geometries of the church ‘temple’ harked back toearly Christianity, as did an adjoining auditorium and social hall for‘friendly gathering’. Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ Scientistin Berkeley, California (1909–11), is characteristically more exuberant,mixing hand-carved neo-Gothic tracery with industrial materials suchas exposed concrete, cement tiles and factory windows. Maybeck was amystical modernist, a fitting designer for this relatively new religion.

Settlement houses provided another site for intense communitylife. Social settlements began in London in the 1880s, large coopera-tive houses in poor urban neighbourhoods where residents, principallycollege-educated single women, fostered close human contact withnearby residents as a basis for professional services, political representa-tion and expanded social knowledge. By 1910 the United States had 400settlements. The most famous was Chicago’s Hull House, established in

Bernard Maybeck,First Church of ChristScientist, Berkeley,California, 1909–11.

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1889 under the leadership of Jane Addams, a social activist who helpedachieve the first juvenile court, compulsory education laws and protec-tive labour legislation. Addams defined settlements as ‘an attempt toexpress the meaning of life in terms of life itself, its forms of activity’.34

Architects Allen and Irving Pond cross-programmed public and privaterealms in their adaptive reuse of a former mansion for Hull House. By1912 the complex of twelve buildings encompassed an entire block. TheLabor Museum celebrated the heritage of local immigrant groups; HullHouse had the nation’s first Little Theatre and the Jane Club, a coop-erative residence for working women. Kindergartens, clinics, clubs,classrooms and bathing facilities were interspersed with coffee houses,dining rooms and sundry meeting places, which attracted more than athousand local and international visitors each week.

Chicago’s Arts and Crafts Society met at Hull House and shared itscommitments. While most such groups idealized handicrafts, this contin-gent embraced industry, convinced (like the German Werkbund) that theartist’s conception of beauty could help overcome oppressive workingconditions and poor-quality products. Frank Lloyd Wright delivered hisfirst manifesto there in 1901, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’. Machinescould be tools for artistic and democratic advancement, he contended, buta machine aesthetic was not itself the incarnation of progress. Only amodern architecture of ‘mutual education’ could direct technologicalenergies to free artists from tedious work, improve the lives of ordinarypeople and humanize ‘this greatest of machines, a great city’.35

John Dewey took Hull House as his ‘working model’ for social cen-tres that provided for adult education and public forums. Boston’s FordHall, founded in 1908, was geared to ‘town meetings’. Frederic Howedirected the larger People’s Institute in New York, where a thousandworking-class men might debate topics from municipal socialism tofeminism. Rochester, New York, used its schools for this purpose in 1907;within five years more than three hundred educational facilities weredoubling as community centres for neighbourhood activism. Schoolswere undergoing a significant change, based in part on Dewey’s ideasabout multiple forms of learning. Needing to expand with millions ofimmigrant children, many unfamiliar with modern city life, hundreds ofnew urban schools were designed to train minds and bodies with moreflexible classrooms, assembly halls, theatres, cafeterias and special areasfor manual or vocational training and domestic science. Gymnasiumsand playgrounds now became fundamental components of Americaneducational facilities. The Chicago-based architect Dwight Perkinsincorporated such facilities into more informal, single-storey suburbanschools that often included open-air classrooms.


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Reed & Stem andWarren & Wetmore,Grand CentralTerminal ‘City’, NewYork City, 1903–13,section.

Other kinds of urban buildings also had to accommodate much larger,more diverse crowds of people and activities. Early twentieth-century busi-ness hotels like New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and Chicago’s La Salle wereimmense, and their disparate facilities carefully organized. Railway termi-nals were complex spatial systems behind their ornate Beaux-Arts façades.New York set the model with McKim Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station(1902–10), occupying two full city blocks. The new Grand Central terminal(1903–13) encompassed even more space and activities in every direction.A major accident in 1902 propelled the state legislature to require electri-fication and underground tracks. This prompted William Wilgus, therailroad’s chief engineer and soon its vice-president, to carry out an ambi-tious double vision over the decade 1903–1913, all the while continuingservice. The architects Reed & Stem and the engineers Warren & Wetmoredesigned a vast new station surrounded by ‘Terminal City’, a complex ofadjacent hotels and offices interconnected via subterranean concoursesand overhead traffic viaducts, as well as street access. In addition, bymoving the noisy, polluting tracks to the north underground, Wilgustransformed 19 hectares of land into the prestigious Park Avenue.

Electric power was essential to thenew public architecture and to metro-politan urbanism. New York’s Broadwaywas first called the ‘Great White Way’ inthe 1890s, paying tribute to the electriclights and illuminated advertising thatamazed visitors with new, ephemeralspectacles. As cities shifted from privateto public ownership of utilities between1900 and 1920, they extended electricitynot only geographically but also tempo-rally. An ‘Architecture of the Night’

encouraged entertainment-oriented businesses to stay open around theclock. Major firms collaborated to transform Main Streets around thecountry into ‘White Ways’, eager to create an aura of progress and glam-our. With key ‘sights’ illuminated, both locals and tourists learned tocomprehend the modern metropolis in terms of exciting architecture.

Animated and illuminated amusement zones anticipated today’snotion of Modernism as spontaneous events. Rem Koolhaas’s bookDelirious New York (1978) praised Brooklyn’s Coney Island for a ‘NewTechnology of the Fantastic’ in decidedly unserious, surreal settingswhere the audience became part of the performance.36 Coney Island’skinesthetic pleasures attracted more than a million visitors a day,especially young people from every social class, eager to suspend con-ventional settings and rules of conduct’. George C. Tilyou openedStepplechase Park in 1897, borrowing directly from the ChicagoExposition’s Midway. Luna Park followed in 1903. Co-owner FredericThompson had studied architecture, which, he claimed, gave him ‘all thelicense in the world’ to create ‘a dream world, perhaps a nightmare world– where all is bizarre and fantastic’.37

Most progressive reformers wanted wholesome forms of leisure anddisapproved of idle pleasures like amusement parks, which nonethelessproliferated on the peripheries of many large cities. Fears about chaoticabandon misunderstood these settings, where the illusion of freedomconcealed an elaborate system that carefully orchestrated technologies,spatial organization and desired effects. American modern environ-ments often exhibit a double theme of control and liberation. SimonPaten, the pragmatist economist and social theorist, recognized thatConey Island was in fact standardized, disciplined and conformistbeneath the gaudy veneer and titillating rides, providing a ‘safety valve’in the volatile economies of contemporary life.38

Luna Park at ConeyIsland, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1905,postcard.


New York, photographby Walker Evans, 1929.

The ‘Roaring Twenties’, the ‘Jazz Age’, ‘Metropolitanism’ – under theseand other exuberant labels the United States became a potent culturalforce in the world in the 1920s, matching its new-found military andeconomic dominance at the end of World War One. Sheldon Cheney’sThe New World Architecture (1930) described the American tempo ofinnovation: ‘What seemed insurgent and revolutionary two years ago isnow the accepted and standard . . . so fast moves “Modernism”.’1 Theterm Modernism was everywhere, from business and advertising to liter-ature, painting, dance, music, photography and architecture. For thefirst time in American history the majority of the population lived incities, and urbanity encouraged a delirious pace of experimentation,especially in New York. Everything was purportedly up-to-date inKansas City and Cleveland, too, and certainly in Los Angeles. The suburbanite William Carlos Williams cried: ‘Back into the city!/Nowhere/The subtle! Everywhere the electric!’2

Like the metropolis with its dynamic, unpredictable amalgams ofpeople and ideas, American Modernism tended to dissolve categorieslike High and Low, spurring lively debates about form and programme.Cosmopolitan American architects and artists embraced multipleModernisms, eschewing any one true path or doctrinaire manifesto. TheBrickbuilder became Architectural Forum in 1917, signalling the impor-tance of debate as well as a shift from masonry details to business acu-men. By 1930 the aia convention was asserting a common groundamong disparate tendencies by criticizing any ‘crystallized vocabulary’,whether the ‘static and inorganic quality of tradition [or] the newEuropean theology’.3 Americans still tend towards such pluralism, anasset for engaging difference, but a hindrance when everything seemsrelative or purportedly equal.

The mood was confident, but not isolationist. ‘Paris is no longer thecapital of Cosmopolis’, wrote one returnee in 1919. ‘New York hasbecome the battleground of modern civilization.’4 Americans hadbecome knowledgeable about contemporary European avant-gardes in

c h a p t e r t h r e e

Electric Modernities, 1919–1932

the arts with the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Architecture followedin the early 1920s. The Journal of the American Institute of Architects firstshowed Le Corbusier’s work in 1923, the same year that ArchitecturalRecord reviewed his Vers une architecture. In 1927, Jane Heap, editor ofthe Little Review, one of many experimental ‘little magazines’ of the1920s, sponsored a popular Machine-Age Exposition in a smallManhattan gallery which showed industrial objects and RussianConstructivist paintings alongside photographs of American andEuropean buildings.5

Given the era’s reverence for business, relatively few architects tried tochallenge conventions or address problematic urban conditions. ‘Ourmodern architecture is frankly commercial’, contended the critic EdwinPark, part of ‘the vulgar turbulent vortex of democratic industrial life’.As if anticipating Rem Koolhaas, Harvey Wiley Corbett expressed fullconfidence that consumerist values were inherently progressive. Keenlyaware of competition from builders, construction-contractor firms andmail-order-plan companies, the profession emphasized skills in ‘prob-lem-solving’ and design research, eschewing the pure incarnations of‘objectivity’ – what the Germans called Sachlichkeit. This new generationknew how to compile the latest functional data on a given problem,explained the Record, how to ‘systematize’ it graphically, then ‘translatethese purposes into buildings’.6

Américanisme, americanismo, Amerikanismus, even Sovietamerikanizm testify to Europeans’ fascination with this business-orient-ed functionalism and their angst about its underlying values. Some out-spoken Americans were equally critical. Frederick Ackerman, a socialistarchitect, studied economics with Thorstein Veblen at the New School inNew York, then joined the short-lived Technical Alliance, whose mem-bers called themselves ‘technocrats’ – the first group in history to use theterm, which to them meant an elite with advanced technological know-how. (Veblen was ‘Chief Engineer’ for this ‘soviet of engineers’ whohoped to overthrow capitalism through expertise aligned with ‘theinstinct of workmanship’.)7 Ackerman criticized his fellow-architects’subservience to capitalism through ‘profit-induced fashions’, includingthat of the emergent modernist aesthetic. ‘Commercialism is a newGod,’ he declared, one that ‘destroys human lives, values and environ-ments’.8 Far from being an outsider, Ackerman voiced his opinions inmajor architectural journals. Despite the Red Scare that followed theRussian Revolution in 1917, American architects of the time were willingto discuss a full spectrum of political ideologies.

Imagery in every sort of medium responded to the changes wroughtby the hyper-commercialism of the 1920s. American photographers, fas-

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cinated by the fast-changing built environment, usually juxtaposed oldand new or muted the abstraction of their European counterparts, occa-sionally experimenting with the simultaneity or ‘interpenetration’ ofviewpoints in montages that supposedly captured the ambiguities ofmodern life. In any case, the professional architectural press confinedalmost all photographs to autonomous portfolios of soft pictorialism.Modern architectural drawings followed three prevailing trends. Oneemphasized dramatic angles and massing – notably Hugh Ferriss’ssmouldering images, which seemed to cry out for bold action. Anotherdrew upon the syncopated rhythms of jazz for Art Deco and streamlinedvehicles for Moderne commercial buildings. A third evoked the preci-sion of statistics, charts and specifications captured in Le Corbusier’ssaying: ‘The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations.’9

Diagrams, too, became increasingly sophisticated, using the virtualspace of the page to relate intellectual and social propositions, anotherprocess of abstraction. Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Plandefined such relations in terms of walking distance, while the ChicagoSchool of Sociology used concentric zones to reify spatial theories thatsuggested how the flow of capital in real estate, industry and financeaffected residential patterns.10 Within a few years, Architectural Recordwould adapt these diagrams. Architectural Graphic Standards epitomizedthe scientific line. A compendium of data and simple drawings first pub-lished in 1932, it became an indispensable tool almost immediately, the

Robert Park andErnest Burgess,Concentric zone theory diagram ofprototypal modernAmerican city fromThe City (1925), left,and A. LawrenceKocher, ‘Typical City’diagram of concentrichousing zones fromArchitectural Record(November 1927),right.

8 1 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2

bible of normative practice throughout the world. Frederick Ackermanhad provided the vision for his two young associates. His forewordpraised the translation of the ‘simple language of facts’ into images.11 Heused the term data in its technical sense to mean quantitative relation-ships between production, materials and human needs, urging archi-tects to engage in materials production, programming, planning andregulations rather than passively accepting what already existed. Onlylater would some critics recognize that ‘abstract visualization’ dehuman-ized workers into mere statistics.12

Even mainstream journals now invoked science. American Architectadded a Department of Architectural Engineering in 1917. ArchitecturalRecord began a ‘new chapter’ a decade later with the declaration:‘Modernism is an attitude of mind – the scientific attitude.’ Readers wereadvised to adopt ‘the research method of science – observation, hypoth-esis, deduction, experimental verification.’13 The moving force was A.Lawrence Kocher, managing editor from 1928 to 1938, simultaneously apreservationist at Colonial Williamsburg and the architect of strikingmodern buildings, notably the Aluminaire House with his partnerAlbert Frey in Syosset, New York (1931). The editorial board includedsignificant modernists like Knud Lönberg-Holm, Henry Wright, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Douglas Haskell. The Record also inaugurated a‘Technical News and Research’ section that analysed a new ‘Problem’every month, providing extensive data about current materials, meth-ods, costs and other ‘performance-based’ criteria. The Associated BusinessPapers awarded this feature and its creator, the architect Robert Davison,first prize for editorial excellence in 1929. Historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock praised Kocher’s work, predicting that Americaseemed ready to produce the ‘most individual and characteristic newarchitecture’.14

Hitchcock’s 1929 book, Modern Architecture, explored over a centuryof advances on two continents. He lauded Frank Lloyd Wright as theincarnation of a ‘New Tradition’, but saw the future in the bold formalexperiments of three ‘New Pioneers’: Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van derRohe and J.J.P. Oud. Increasingly disturbed by the wide-ranging diversi-ty of architecture in the us, Hitchcock felt a need for one controllingstyle. Philip Johnson, a wealthy young aesthete who shared those con-cerns, contended that Europe had already achieved an architecture thatwas ‘unified and inclusive, not fragmentary and contradictory’.15

Johnson was searching for a cause. He would take up fascism and otherright-wing movements in the late 1930s before going to architectureschool and then continuously renewing his role as a polemicist, indeeda pundit. Few individuals anywhere have anticipated or directed the

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currents of change in architecture with his distinctive combination ofpower and impertinence.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr, Director of New York’s fledgling Museum ofModern Art (moma), persuaded Hitchcock to revise his text into a shortbook and exhibition in collaboration with Johnson. They christened theproject ‘Modern Architecture’ as if theirs was the only legitimate use ofthe term. Barr coined the catchier phrase ‘International Style’, an evenmore all-encompassing mantle. This was in part a reference to theInternational Congresses for Modern Architecture (ciam), founded in1928. European aesthetics also responded to social conditions, such asthe rise of pacifism and social-democratic governments, intent uponremaking cities after World War One and providing services for work-ing-class populations. The avant-garde were fascinated by modern con-struction technologies; ‘laboratory’ materials like concrete, steel andglass; and smooth, unornamented surfaces. Yet today’s historians rightlyquestion the inherent unity and progressive social agenda of whatcame to be called the Modern Movement. Some architects insisted thatfunctional considerations, whether scientific or political, determinedtheir designs, while others gave priority to artistic and emotional expres-sionism. Claiming to distill an incontestable worldwide phenomenon,the moma Modern Architecture exhibit of 1932 made its case by focusingexclusively on work that fit the curators’ formal criteria.

Two official publications accompanied the moma exhibit: a formalcatalogue entitled Modern Architecture and The International Style:Architecture since 1922, a pithy synopsis of ideas with the same illustra-tions. Both codified Modernism in terms of three ‘principles’: volumerather than mass; regularity without axial symmetry; and strict aversionto applied ornament – in other words, rigid formal rules based onabstract spatial relations. Hitchcock and Johnson believed thatAmerican architecture needed discipline, not individualism, and cer-tainly not social purpose. They discreetly acknowledged that modernarchitecture was ‘clearly distinguishable’ from one country to another.Needing to include some American examples if only to legitimize theinternational claim, the selection favoured recent émigrés like WilliamLescaze and Richard Neutra. Although Barr detested Raymond Hood asa false, profit-driven opportunist, he made the cut. moma’s high priestsridiculed almost all the skyscrapers of the 1920s and early 1930s as the‘crude’ products of ‘confused’, ‘half-modern’ commercial ‘impresarios’who would surely be hostile to aesthetic reform.16

Low-cost housing reform, a fundamental concern for mostEuropeans, was relegated to an addendum to the books and to a backroom at the exhibition overseen by Lewis Mumford and Catherine

Bauer. Hitchcock would look back twenty years later, slightly embarrassedby the ‘narrow . . . condescending . . . puristic’ absolutism of that youth-ful polemic.17 In fact, his second thoughts had appeared even earlier,when he had produced books and exhibitions on Richardson andWright, nineteenth-century American ‘vernacular’ architecture and pat-tern books. These subjects, innovative in their own terms, had inspiredContinental modernists. Hitchcock sought unsuccessfully to counter themyth, still firmly entrenched today, that a ‘design migration’ hadbrought Modernism from Europe to a backward nation.

For too long the 1932 moma exhibition has been lauded as the defin-ing point in the history of American modern architecture. In fact, it hada limited impact on both the public and the profession. Most critics ofthe time complained that it was both narrow-minded and reductivelyformalist, exorcizing any social and political aspirations. The exhibitionhad several venues outside New York, often in department stores. Meantto be didactic, it was really just a label – indeed a ‘fashion show’, wroteKnud Lönberg-Holm in Shelter.18 The curators expunged diverse exper-iments on every continent and reduced the us to a caricature, true insome ways but far too all-encompassing, that of an ignorant and purelycommercial wasteland in desperate need of guidance. The 1920s were farmore interesting than we have been led to believe.

Towering Commerce

The decade began with the Chicago Tribune’s announcement of an inter-national competition for its new headquarters. This was above all a bril-liant marketing strategy, especially since the site was one of the firstproperties in the expansion of the city’s central business district alongNorth Michigan Avenue, made possible by a 1920 bridge across theChicago River. The newspaper’s public-relations department pro-claimed a lofty civic purpose of educating the public about architectur-al history and Modernism. They leavened the missionary zeal with occa-sional cartoon spoofs. Publicity continued for several years, even after theannouncement of a winner in 1922. The businessmen who dominatedthe jury liked Howells’ and Hood’s Gothic-draped skyscraper. Itsinnovations – novel wind-bracing with diagonal structures, use of pub-lic-transit tunnels to free the street from excavation and storage – wereindependent of the architectural design. Many people, then and now,preferred Eliel Saarinen’s ‘enchanted mountain’, which took secondplace. Far from a martyr, Saarinen immigrated to the us a year later, amove sponsored by the Tribune.19 Americans eagerly absorbed hisscheme as an expression of progressive design. Western Architect, based

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in Chicago, adopted an abstracted version as its official logo. The com-petition was not a failure or a retreat, as has often been charged, for itstimulated local and international debate about multiple possibilities forskyscraper design.

Today’s modernists no longer disdain commercial buildings. Manyarchitects now acknowledge the pleasures of Art Deco undisturbed byits popular appeal, its florid surface ornament and its overt commercial-ism. (This certainly does not validate the recent surge of facile adapta-tions and outright copies.) Yet ‘Art Deco’ is a concept of recent vintage.‘Moderne’, ‘modernist’ and ‘modernistic’ were the descriptive labels inthe 1920s and ’30s, first for decorative objects, then for a smooth, synco-pated geometric architecture with visibly machine-made surfaces, typi-cally adorned with polychrome ornament. The term ‘Art Deco’ onlyarrived in the 1960s with renewed interest in the legendary 1925Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.20

American Art Deco was not mere imitation, since the first examplepredates the 1925 exposition: New York’s Barclay-Vesey, designed byRalph Walker and completed in 1923 for the New York TelephoneCompany. Cities all over the country (and soon all over the world)quickly set out to boost their images with brilliant new towers, such asDetroit’s Guardian Building (1929), the Atlantic Richfield Building inLos Angeles (1929), Seattle’s Olympic Tower (1931), and the Kansas CityPower and Light Company Building (1931). Houston marked its new sta-tus as the largest city in Texas with a construction surge that includedthe Gulf Building (1929), based on Saarinen’s second-place proposal forChicago. Atlanta’s City Hall (1930), another such appropriation, is one ofseveral governmental skyscrapers of the decade.

These architects paid no attention to structural honesty or restraint,the hallmarks of orthodox Modernism. They took a different pathtowards modernity, exploring visual perception and ephemeral specialeffects, qualities of considerable interest to today’s designers. HerbertCroly praised the ‘Architectural Effects’ that could be achieved throughcolour and light, especially the fantastic illusory settings that emerged atnight. The experience may have disturbed the puritanical gatekeepers of

Eliel Saarinen,abstract drawing ofsecond-place ChicagoTribune competitionentry, 1922, coverpage and frontispiecefor Western Architect(1926).


Howe & Lescaze,Philadelphia SavingsFund Society Tower,1928–31.

modern architecture, but it enthralled those in other arts. ‘Here is ourpoetry,’ wrote Ezra Pound, usually a critic of American culture, ‘for wehave pulled down the stars to our will.’21

Skyscrapers were money-making machines. Speedy construction andresonant imagery helped determine design. Then as now, corporateexecutives liked façades that called attention to themselves. Holabird &Root (sons of the Chicago School giants) adapted Saarinen’s Tribuneentry for the Chicago Daily News Building (1925–9), adding a publicplaza that stepped down to the river. Raymond Hood’s modern towersembraced New York’s dense vivacity. He accentuated the height of hisDaily News Building (1925–9) with the illusion of vertical stripes inwhite glazed brick offset by dark horizontal bands. The enigmatic black-glass lobby attracted so many tourists that another entrance had to becreated. Hood’s Radiator Building (1924) gleamed in black and gold,while his McGraw-Hill Building (1931) shifted from blue-green at thebase to an ethereal blue at the crown, as if dematerializing into the sky.The ‘spirited struggle’ for ‘experimental eclecticism’ of Ely JacquesKahn’s dazzling glass-and-polychrome skyscrapers helped define corpor-ations and specialized districts like the new central business district ofmidtown Manhattan.22

New York’s Chrysler Building (1930) marked a new stage in Art Decospectacles. William Reynolds, a speculative developer and the creator of

Holabird & Root,Chicago Daily NewsBuilding, Chicago,1925–9.

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Coney Island’s Dreamland, mounted an intense publicity campaignabout William Van Alen’s 77-storey design sheathed in expensive stainlesssteel. When the auto magnate Walter P. Chrysler bought the proposal in1928, Van Alen added new ornament based on hubcaps and a magnificentcrown of illuminated arcs. He saved the most dramatic gesture until thelast moment in late October 1929. Everything seemed complete until a‘vertex’ spire, 56 metres high, secretly constructed and hidden inside, roseover the course of a few hours to make this the world’s tallest building, ifonly for a few months until the Empire State topped it with 86 storeysand a zeppelin mooring mast. Critics condemned the stunt, but theChrysler became a beloved symbol of New York, recently dubbed‘Rhapsody in Chrome’.23

The iconic skyscraper for modern historians is the 32-storeyPhiladelphia Savings Fund Society tower, a design that evolved over sev-eral years. George Howe started with a sleek tower in 1928. Then his new

partner, the young Swiss architect WilliamLescaze, made the scheme more ‘correct’ –i.e., horizontal. When the frustrated client,James Willcox, demanded a resolution in1931, the asymmetrical design brilliantly syn-thesized the horizontal banding of the floorsand the vertical thrust of the tower.Materials and fenestration mark the differ-ent sectors inside. Advertisements declaredthat there was ‘Nothing More Modern’ thanthe building’s numerous technologicaladvances, such as dropped ceilings ofacoustical tile that provide ‘silver stillness’and hermetically sealed windows for ‘com-plete environmental control’. The scarletneon psfs sign on the roof screens coolingtowers for an early air-conditioning system.Willcox praised the ‘ultra-practical’ result.24

Immense mixed-use complexes were pro-moted as ‘cities within a city’ that benefitedthe public at large. Walter Ahlschlager builtsuch enclaves in Chicago, New York,Memphis, Detroit and Oklahoma City.Cincinnati’s Carew Complex (1929–31) fea-tured a dramatic, almost Baroque sequence ofpublic spaces leading from a huge hotel to anadjacent office tower, testifying to

Walter Ahlschlagerwith Delano &Aldrich, Carew Towerand Fountain Square,Cincinnati, Ohio,1929–31, postcard ofilluminated nightview.

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Ahlschlager’s experience as a theatre architect. A through-block shoppingarcade made shopping up-to-date with links to department stores. The 25-storey parking garage was one of only two ‘automated’ facilities in a down-town skyscraper at that time.25

For many people New York’s Rockefeller Center still embodies cos-mopolitan American modernity, but it scarcely looked that way early on.A private donor, John D. Rockefeller, Jr, had assembled the midtown sitein 1928, calling it Metropolitan Square for commerce enhanced by a newopera house. The multi-block complex required a team, the AssociatedArchitects, that combined the reliable firm of Reinhard & Hofmeisterwith two more daring consultants, Harvey Wiley Corbett and RaymondHood. Hood envisaged ‘A City under a Single Roof ’ as a network of tow-ers connected by upper-level walkways and subterranean tunnels, whichsoon became a more feasible underground concourse and rooftop ter-races. The scene drew inspiration from nearby Grand Central’s TerminalCity. When the Metropolitan Opera withdrew in 1929, a more popularart form, the Radio Corporation of America (rca), took its pivotal sitewith a thin, 70-storey office slab, and the site became Radio City.

The name Rockefeller Center came with the gala opening in 1932,evoking financial stability through its patron’s name. The sequence ofpublic and semi-public spaces had adapted to a series of unexpectedeconomic contingencies and now seemed harmonious. Yet one centrifu-gal space came much later in response to the failure of the shops in thesunken plaza. Four years after the opening, Hood reconsidered the lowerlevel and decided to create an open-air skating rink with restaurants toboth sides. Public response remained mixed. Lewis Mumford attackedthe ‘organized chaos’ for years, condemning the ‘bad guesses’ and‘grandiose inanities’ of this ‘paper architecture’. Then suddenly, like mostpeople, he grew fond of Rockefeller Center, calling it ‘a serene eyeful’ in1939. He never explained his change of heart and always lamented theprivate ownership of public space.26

Mumford was not alone in stressing the negative side of modernpublic spaces, housing and workplaces. Tensions built everywhere duringthe boom years of the 1920s. Upton Sinclair coined the term ‘white-collar’ in 1919 for the fast-growing stratum of office employees whodistinguished themselves from ‘blue-collar’ factory workers and identi-fied strongly with their companies. Professional managers continued totransfer the concept of work flow from the factory to the clerical pool,insisting that maximum visibility in a large open space increased produc-tion and loyalty. Lee Galloway used a photo of the atrium in Wright’s1906 Larkin Building as the frontispiece for his 1919 book OfficeManagement. ‘American plan’ offices contrasted the central holding pens

for female clerks and typists with private rooms for male managers,painstakingly gradated by size and status. New technologies also affect-ed office buildings. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (hvac)controls advanced with ‘manufactured weather’, internal systems thatfreed the façade from its role as mediator between interior and exteriorenvironments.27

The ‘Hawthorne Experiment’ turned managers’ attention away fromenvironmental improvements. A team of social scientists set out tomeasure how illumination levels affected female workers at Chicago’sHawthorne Works in 1927. Confounded by inconclusive results, theybrought in new consultants who experimented with other variables. In1932 the Harvard psychologist Elton Mayo announced that ambientenvironments are not as significant for well-being and productivity asteamwork, learning and even the researchers’ attention to the employ-ees’ responses. This came to be called ‘the Hawthorne effect’.28 While


Rockefeller Center,plan of concourselevel of main complex.

Rienhard &Hofmeister withHarvey Wiley Corbettand Raymond Hood,RCA Tower andRockefeller Center,New York City,1928–32.

there is still debate about the phenomenon, it prompted ana-lysts to focus on work relationsmore than architectural reforms.

Industry too shifted towardsscientific research in the 1920s.Albert Kahn helped expand HenryFord’s vision with a massive newplant on the River Rouge outsideDetroit, near the original factory.First used during World War One,some 100,000 men soon workedon the sprawling 1,000-acre sitethat would eventually encompassalmost 100 buildings, the largestand most famous factory in theworld. Major advances in Ford’splate-glass factory (1922) wouldhave repercussions in architecturalwindows, while the EngineeringLaboratory (1925) helped controlthe production and processing forvirtually every component.Recognizing that these iconic

images of modernity helped promote his ‘brand’, Ford commissionedbrilliant paintings and photographs of Kahn’s plants.

Other companies engineered special research centres as well. Unlikeearlier university-based facilities, corporate research and development(r&d) buildings were free to explore daring designs as a form of adver-tising. Engineering and chemical corporations promoted new researchlaboratories as expressions of scientific innovations, even as they tight-ened security over what happened inside. One of the most dazzling, theA. O. Smith Company’s Research and Engineering Building inMilwaukee (1930), featured a bold façade in aluminium and glass. A par-allel increase in scale in other fields tended towards blank façades,notably the parabolic steel shed for what was then the largest building inthe world, the Goodyear Airship Dock in Akron, Ohio (1930).(Hitchcock belatedly praised it in 1951.) The unaesthetic aesthetics ofthis era were geared to expansion, flexibility and control, signalling theemergence of r&d in corporate science.

Holabird & Root, A. O. Smith Researchand EngineeringBuilding, Milwaukee,Wisconsin, 1930.

Ford plant at RiverRouge, Michigan, pho-tograph by CharlesSheeler, 1922.


Visionary Cities

Seeking to press beyond commissions for individual buildings, manyarchitects drew schemes for the modern cityscapes they hoped to see.Richard Neutra worked on his imaginary scheme for ‘Rush CityReformed’ between 1925 and 1930, taking Southern California as anarchetype. Touting the slogan ‘Ameliorate, not agitate’, Neutra juxta-posed anonymous prefabricated housing slabs and towers with livelydrive-in shopping. Fast-moving superhighways, bus stations and air-ports provided for the continuous ‘transfer’ of human energy, a majortheme in the project’s initial publication in his Wie baut Amerika? (‘HowDoes America Build?’) (1927). Reaction was broadly positive, includingHitchock’s acclaim that ‘Creation is again . . . a possibility, and nowheremore so than in America.’29 Raymond Hood preferred a denser urbanlandscape based on New York’s skyscrapers, which he imagined as ametropolitan concentration of towers or strung along a remarkableexpansion of the city’s bridges. Harvey Wiley Corbett envisioned

Raymond Hood, ‘CityWithin a City’, 1929,aerial view. Drawingfrom ContemporaryAmerican Architects:Raymond M. Hood(1931).

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Manhattan’s streets as multi-level traffic systems. All American visionsof the future relied on far-reaching transportation infrastructures.

The Regional Plan Association of America (rpaa), founded in NewYork in 1923, was much broader in purview. This small multi-discipli-nary group anticipated many of the environmental and social concernsof the early twenty-first century. The rpaa was sentimental about small-town America (as depicted in Mumford’s 1939 film, The City), but it con-nected housing, social services, infrastructure and conservation as nec-essary factors in regional development. If Mumford was their primespokesperson, the ‘ecologist’ Benton MacKaye embodied the rpaa’s keyambitions. MacKaye was among the first to use the word environment,understood to extend from metropolitan centres to wildernesses andeven virtual realms, a shifting ‘flow’ of ideas, images and activities thataffected change at many levels. Influenced by the pragmatists, MacKayespoke of ‘visualizing’ ongoing changes through various media.30

Another group with a similar name would continue to affect develop-ment. The Regional Plan Association of New York and Environs (rpa)enjoyed a full decade of research funded by more than a million dollarsfrom the Russell Sage Foundation. Its conclusions and projectionsappeared in two hefty volumes illustrated by architects with divergentmodern proclivities, and an eight-volume statistical survey of the regionin 1929–31. Robert Moses and the Port Authority would implement manyrpa proposals from the 1930s until the early 1960s: Manhattan as a globalcity geared to finance, luxury housing and culture; the gentrification ofHarlem and the Lower East Side; the dispersal of industry outside the city;a dramatic increase in leisure facilities as the exemplars of modernity; andsprawling residential suburbs for specific classes. This last point remainedvague since the rpa’s pro-business vision led the group to drop a pro-posed ninth report on housing as overly controversial, since the datarevealed class inequalities.31 Those same ambitious but biased prioritiesdrive today’s rpa and other groups like it around the country.

The Many Faces of Modern Housing

The acute need for housing after World War One forced up costs.Presidents Coolidge and Hoover championed home ownership, hopingto stimulate the house-building industry, but without pressing it to bemore rational or cost-effective. The resulting increase in production (8million new units in the 1920s, mostly before 1926) saw the rise of large-scale ‘developers’ who relied on modern materials and mass production,usually hidden behind façades that evoked romantic myths of nationalheritage, aristocratic ancestry or exotic charm. The 1920s suburbs for the


elite were often carefully planned, including public-transit systems, butthe flood of inexpensive dwellings was usually plagued by shoddy con-struction and cramped spaces.32 Uniformity and cacophony were less ofan issue than the problems they obscured: laissez-faire municipal gov-ernments that tolerated poor construction; uncoordinated productionand regulations that inflated costs; dreary house and site plans underthe guise of economy; tensions about social and financial security thatdramatically increased class and racial segregation. The astute HenryWright of St Louis deplored the ‘millions of cheap shoddy houses . . .very distinctive but all alike’.33 Yet he believed that this idiosyncraticAmerican pattern could generate alternatives by combining new tech-nologies with careful site plans, staking a claim in between the twopoles of European Modernism, its elegant custom villas and itsExistenzminimum blocks of workers’ housing.

Gifted modern architects won public respect for their private houses,nowhere more so than in southern California. R. M. Schindler, Neutra,Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright worked in and around LosAngeles, sustained by an avant-garde culture of European émigrés andflamboyantly successful Americans.34 Each one developed innovativeconcrete systems, adapted to normative construction processes since theywere intended to be mass prototypes. Schindler’s experiments were themost radical and varied, including tilt-up panels, ‘slab-cast’ and sprayedgunite. Neutra applied gunite to the delicate steel matrix of the LovellHealth House (1927–9) and developed a series of prefabrication systemsthat stressed ‘lightness of construction’ with concrete aggregates, as wellas a 1930 tensile structure based on the circus tent.35 Driven in part by theincreased price of lumber, Wright took up cheap concrete-block, asking,‘Why not see what could be done with that gutter-rat?’36

Schindler arrived in Los Angeles in 1919 to supervise Wright’sHollyhock House (1921). Originally from Vienna, he had come toAmerica at the urging of Adolph Loos, then apprenticed to Wright atTaliesin in Wisconsin. In 1921 Schindler built a communal dwelling onKing’s Road in Hollywood for his family and that of his friend ClydeChace. The intricate sequence of shared and private spaces includesseven distinct outdoor zones. The materials, all left exposed, juxtaposethin concrete wall panels with redwood ceilings and taut expanses oflightweight canvas. Schindler described the house as a spatial marriageof the solid, permanent cave and the improvised, ephemeral tent.Socially it embraced his wife Pauline’s hope for ‘as democratic a meet-ing-place as Hull House’.37 Schindler was a committed socialist, but fewof his designs for workers’ colonies or moderate-cost tract houses wereever realized. Hitchcock and Johnson were put off by his idiosyncratic

Rudolph Schindler,Schindler-ChaceHouse, WestHollywood, California,1921–2, outdoor patio.

Schindler-ChaceHouse, plan of houseand gardens.


balance of intuition, invention and social interventions, refusing him aplace in their canon, a slight that wounded Schindler deeply. His princi-pal reputation remained that of an artist-architect intrigued byephemeral planes and interlocking volumes, although in fact his visionwas much larger.

Schindler’s Lovell Beach House (1925–6), another masterpiece ofAmerican Modernism, used five transverse frames in reinforced con-crete to support the house, literally and figuratively. They generated itsrhythm, provided seismic protection and lifted up the main living areafor majestic views of the ocean. The textures of concrete and untreatedwood were rough and tactile, for this was a primitive shelter, not a‘machine for living’. The ‘play-court’ in the sand beneath the houseembodied site-specificity and even a primal hearth with its outdoorfireplace, offset by the asymmetry of a stair up and a ramp down to thesea. The interior revealed Schindler’s concept of sculptural ‘spaceforms’ in a De Stijl-like play of minute details and broad expanses.Despite its sturdy materials and lavish budget, the house embracedimpermanence, even cheapness, by adapting conventional builders’materials and methods. Schindler was initially inspired by the functionalpile structures often found in beachfront dwellings – a fact thatintrigued the editors of Popular Mechanics.38

Neutra, another Austrian, arrived in Los Angeles in 1925, also havingapprenticed with Wright, and lived at King’s Road for five years. Hequickly understood that Modernism’s fame – and his own – relied on

Rudolph Schindler,Lovell Beach House,Newport Beach,California, 1925–6.

Richard Neutra, LovellHealth House, LosAngeles, 1927–9,showing constructionof steel frame.

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publicity. Neutra’s magnificent Lovell Health House represents his firsttriumph. This was the same Dr Philip Lovell, the charismatic author ofa popular newspaper column on physical and mental fitness, whoturned to Neutra after Schindler had designed his beach house. PerhapsLovell recognized a kindred charismatic spirit, since Neutra prescribed a‘full dosage of environment’ for what he dubbed the ‘Health House’.39

Practical experience with American contractors helped Neutra appro-priate materials and techniques from commercial buildings: an open-web steel frame, standardized steel casements, a dramatic double-heightglass wall and slender steel cables from the roof to stabilize the balconies.European in its geometry, the relation with the landscape makes this anAmerican house. The steep site was an essential component. The build-ing proceeds down a rocky hillside, broken by small terraces and a pathto the swimming pool, before terminating in a running track. The houseimmediately became the apotheosis of the International Style and alocal landmark, even an advertisement for Lovell. When he invitedreaders to see it themselves in 1929, some 15,000 Angelenos took up theoffer.40 The experience profoundly affected Neutra, who continued topromote an ambient, open-air hedonism as the basis for physiologicaland psychological well-being throughout his career, a synthesis hewould later call ‘bio-realism’.

Frank Lloyd Wright relocated to southern California in 1917 and againon his return from Japan in 1923. Nature posed difficult challenges on the

Richard Neutra at thefoot of his LovellHealth House.

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Pacific Rim with earthquakes, floods, mudslides, brushfires and parcheddesert heat further inland. Wright adopted new materials, notably a tech-nique his son Lloyd had used for the Bollman House in Hollywood (1922).Wright père named it the Textile-Block system in reference to the texturedexterior patterns and the reinforcing steel set into grooves inside theblocks, weaving them together even under seismic pressure. He experi-mented with a variety of techniques for a ‘kaleidoscopic’ array of clients:the Hollyhock House for the wealthy theatre patron Aline Barnsdale; theAlice Millard House (‘La Miniatura’) for a widowed bookseller (1923); aproposed desert compound for the solitary A. M. Johnson; and severalresort communities that disrupted conventional notions of domesticity.41

Housing research became more systematic all over the country. Atone end were small collective enclaves like Schindler’s and Neutra’sArchitectural Group for Industry and Commerce (agic), FrederickAckerman’s Technocracy groups, Buckminster Fuller’s Structural StudyAssociates and Philadelphia’s Housing Study Guild. At the other end

Frank Lloyd Wright,Alice Millard House(‘La Miniatura’),Pasadena, California,perspective from thegarden, coloured pencil and graphite on paper, 1923.

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were major enterprises like President Herbert Hoover’s CommerceDepartment, which standardized building materials, and theDepartment of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory, which devel-oped stressed-skin plywood panels. Architectural Record’s RobertDavison became director of a well-funded housing division at the JohnB. Pierce Foundation in 1931, overseeing a large staff of designers andsociologists in the country’s most far-reaching experiments with prefab-rication. Eager to corner a new market, the Architects’ Small HouseService Bureau, founded in Minneapolis in 1921, generated 250 stock-plan designs, all historicist in style though adapted to different climates,available for $6.00 per room.

The architect Clarence Stein convinced a New York financier to formthe limited-dividend City Housing Corporation, another group dedicatedto modern housing – as this group understood the term, with an empha-sis on site planning and cooperative financing rather than architecture perse. Respect for English Garden City ideals coalesced with an awareness ofproblems caused by the profit-driven American superstructure of finan-

cial institutions, real-estate developers and buildingindustries. Stein and his partner Henry Wrightdesigned the first venture, Sunnyside Gardens inQueens, New York (1924–8), together with FrederickAckerman, all members of the rpaa. LewisMumford, who became a resident, called it ‘prag-matic idealism with a vengeance’, contending thatthe relatively banal architecture accentuated resi-dents’ connections to the collective garden-court-yards and social services.42

Stein and Wright also created Radburn, NewJersey, intended as a self-sufficient garden commu-nity, a ‘Town for the Motor Age’. Begun in 1928,Radburn synthesized various progressive concepts:a greenbelt, spacious common greenswards, super-blocks, a differentiated road system and pedestrianwalkways that never crossed vehicular streets.Ackerman designed many homes and the townshopping centre. Radburn was planned for diversesocial classes, work possibilities and housing types –all with attached garages. The Depression reducedthese goals to a pleasant model suburb rather thana valiant alternative.43

Buckminster Fuller was not an architect, norcan his designs and polemics be easily classified. He

R. Buckminster Fuller,Minimum DymaxionHouse, 1929.

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emphasized ‘shelter’ as opposed to architecture and derided ‘outdated’concepts like property ownership, convinced that he could transformthe world by doing ‘more with less’. The press touted his polygonalDymaxion House design (1929) of steel and plastic as the prototypedwelling for the future. (‘Dymaxion’ meant ‘dynamic’ plus ‘maximumefficiency’.) In characteristically obscure yet prescient language, Fullerdescribed design as a ‘Check list of the/Universal DesignRequirements/of a Scientific Dwelling Facility–/as a component func-tion/of a world-encompassing service industry’.44 His 1928 4d manifesto– a reference to time as the fourth dimension – envisioned an apart-ment-building variation with a stack of ‘4-d Utility Units’ made oftransparent plastic walls.

Displays of Fuller’s prototypes were quite popular, but only theDymaxion car and the prefabricated Dymaxion bathroom unit enjoyedeven minor success. He rarely considered emotions or site planning,convinced that information and integral processes of change (‘ephemer-alization’) would lead to progress. His own reputation shows thatprocess. The aia rejected his offer of rights to the patents for theDymaxion House in 1929, passing a resolution that condemned all pre-fabricated building as ‘peas-in-a-pod reproducible designs’.45 Almostforty years later, Fuller appeared on the cover of Time with a panoply ofhis inventions and the aia awarded him its gold medal.

Some later historians have implied that single-family houses definedthe 1920s, but the new large-scale residential developments also investedin apartment buildings for cities and suburbs. ‘Rather than eliminatingthe home’, explained one book, ‘these new types of multi-dwelling housesoffer a new type of home [based on] convenience.’46 Cosmopolitan apart-ment buildings flourished, ranging from luxurious to livable, prized todayas ‘pre-war’ buildings. The boom extended everywhere. Grand apartmenttowers transformed the character of Chicago, Manhattan and the Bronx.Nelle Peters became one of the most productive architects in Kansas Cityby specializing in apartment buildings. By 1928 multi-unit buildings con-stituted 53 per cent of new construction in Los Angeles, a region thataccording to Architectural Record, enjoyed ‘the most promising newdesigns’ for apartments.47

Urban apartment-hotels and ‘bachelor hotels’ attracted single people.Inexpensive hotels featured compact ‘efficiency’ units, later known assingle-room occupancy (sro); lodging houses were far more spartanwith only cubicles or open floors. In contrast, low-rise, high-density ‘gar-den apartments’ were popular just outside the dense central areas ofcities. (The self-trained architect Andrew J. Thomas apparently coinedthe term.) Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and especially southern


California developed many appealing variations on the type.Confronting a crisis in affordable housing, several states and municipal-ities helped unions and limited-dividend companies sponsor housing.Most were cooperative apartment complexes that included communalmeeting rooms, laundries, childcare and expansive outdoor areas. TheAmalgamated Clothing Workers’ projects in the Bronx and Manhattanare among the most impressive. In 1931 Architectural Record distilledsome of the ways to avoid monotony through staggered site plans forgarden-apartment arrangements.48 Unlike in Europe, all Americanhousing had to engage client preferences, which meant an emphasis onirregular massing, soft landscaping, familiar motifs – and garages. All thesame, alarmed about the perceived risk of transitory neighbours, manycities and elite suburban areas passed restrictive covenants and rigid zon-ing restrictions that banned everything but single-family houses.

A. Lawrence Kochlerand Albert Frey, garden apartments,various site plans,from ArchitecturalRecord (April 1931).

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Cars, Clubs and Cinemas

Automobiles redefined American public space during the 1920s. Everycity carved out space for parking lots and public garages, also called‘automobile hotels’. Knud Lönberg-Holm undertook extensive researchfor an article on petrol stations in Architectural Record. Bypassing mod-ernist polemics, he stressed the benefits of easy cleaning, visual unity,efficient movement and bright signs. Standard Oil of Ohio and Texacocommissioned standardized modern stations along these lines.49 Newkinds of stores were also geared to automobiles. The first super-markets were extremely plain, clean designs that combined extensiveparking with vast, non-directional, self-service space inside. Drive-inmarkets used eye-catching roofs and signage to grab drivers’ attention.Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles became a new kind of linear down-town geared to automobile traffic. Bullock’s Wilshire (1929) was thefirst department store to orient its main façade towards the parking.Meanwhile, suburban shopping centres used packaged themes to pro-vide social and economic hubs that combined shops with landscapedareas and parking.

Modern hospitals also adapted to the car with extensive parking andpatient drop-off areas, one piece of a profound shift in biomedical envi-ronments and clientele. Before World War One, hospitals had principallyserved the poor with open charity wards. Doctors saw paying patientsin small offices or visited them at home. Boston’s Lying-In Hospital(1922) was the first to medicalize childbirth. Now larger, yet compactlyorganized within multiple specialized departments, hospitals providednew models of expertise, efficiency and comfort to attract middle- andupper-class patients. These up-to-date facilities provided the familiarhygienic metaphors for modernist aesthetics: surgeries were small, spe-cialized rooms, unlike the earlier teaching amphitheatres, and sanitizedlaboratories became a necessity.

New York’s consolidated Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital inauguratedthe diversified skyscraper facility as an interconnected ‘medical centre’.Encompassing seven buildings on more than eight hectares in northernManhattan, this complex combined a modern research facility, teachinghospital and general hospital for the surrounding area. The architectJames Gamble Rogers used flow diagrams and technical data to addresswhat he called the three functional problems for hospital design: controland collaboration in scientific research, improved hygiene and efficientcirculation systems (principally to facilitate the doctors’ ease of move-ment). The first stage, begun in 1921 and completed in 1928, drew praisefor the ‘size, simplicity and austerity’ of the astylar towers.50 Building


heights, window placement and rooftop solariums were based on thera-peutic, not aesthetic, considerations. The luxurious Harkness Wingdrew elite patients and a strong donor base. This was the first hospitalorganized around modern laboratories, x-rays and technical monitor-ing. Within a decade most hospitals were devoting two-thirds of theirfloor area to such services.51

Other educational facilities followed the shift to clean lines, openspaces and specialization. The theories of John Dewey and MariaMontessori encouraged ‘progressive’ educators to adopt more flexibleclassrooms, while the San Francisco school architect John J. Donovanargued that schools should be geared to the emotional and intellectualneeds of different age groups. Nursery schools and kindergartens for

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Alfred Clauss andGeorge Daub, servicestation for theStandard OilCompany, Cleveland,Ohio, 1931, one of aseries of 40.

Lloyd Wright, Yucca-Vine Market, LosAngeles, 1928.

middle-class children showed the strongest evidence of these theories.Elementary schools were informal and home-like, rarely more than onestorey high, while high schools and the new junior high schools provideda degree of order and monumentality for adolescents.

The New School for Social Research in New York, founded in 1919,was oriented towards a progressive ‘new social order’. When the econo-mist Alvin Johnson became director, he popularized psychoanalysis,Marxism, modern dance and expressionist drama, commissioning anew building for continuing education in 1929. Joseph Urban, principallya theatre and set designer, adapted bold, abstract patterns with greateconomy of means. Urban used 90 colours for the interior, the choicesgoverned by lighting, programmatic codes and what he termed empa-thetic studies of perception.

The electrifying architecture of entertainment enhanced urbannightlife. Prohibition encouraged an explosion of new venues formovies and theatrical performances. New York’s most spectaculartheatres and clubs were concentrated around Times Square, whileHarlem was the epicentre of a ‘Renaissance’ in African-American cul-ture – especially remarkable in music and dance – that resonated in


James Gamble Rogers, Columbia-Presbyterian MedicalCenter, New York,1921–8.

other cities north and south. Some night-clubs fused modernist imagery with Africanmotifs in their design as well as perform-ances. Disproving the idea that brilliantarchitecture generates progressive effects,the patrons were usually whites only.Hundreds of clubs, cinemas and perform-ance spaces around the country catered tosegregated African-American audiences,some grand, others spare. One lavishensemble opened in 1914 in Atlanta’s SweetAuburn district, variously called theAuditorium, Pioneer and Royal, alongsidethe Odd Fellows Hall. Then, as now, extrav-agance usually meant highly orchestratedperformances rather than creative experi-mentation, but audiences were enthralledby the spectacles.

Vachel Lindsay’s Art of the MovingPicture (1916) had challenged architects toseize this new medium as ‘propaganda’ topublicize new visions of ‘a futureCincinnati, Cleveland or St Louis . . . Whynot erect our new America?’52 For morethan a decade, that mandate generatedflamboyant ‘palaces’ with fulsome orna-ment. Palaces legitimated movies as mid-

dle-class culture, erasing the working-class origins of nickelodeons. Asmall coterie of architectural firms established distinctive styles topublicize particular Hollywood studios and their chains of theatres.Patrons were drawn to ‘Wonder Theatres’ and ‘Atmospherics’ – whichcreated the illusion of being outdoors, ‘to avoid being boring’,explained the architect John Eberson.53 Large cities built palaces with3,000 to 6,000 seats, orchestra pits and elaborate stages for music anddance performances. The opulent lobbies, often as big as the audito-riums, might provide childcare, kennels, lounges and refreshments,while tall office buildings overhead made the multi-purpose complexeseven more profitable. The introduction of sound in 1926 ended thevariety of entertainment in favour of longer ‘feature films’. (NewYork’s Radio City Music Hall of 1932 was the exception.) Within a yearthe country had more than 17,000 movie theatres, often the mostopulent and exciting buildings in town. As the Los Angeles architect

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Joseph Urban, NewSchool for SocialResearch, New YorkCity, 1929–31, streetfaçade.

Winold Reiss, ClubGallant, New YorkCity, 1919, side elevation.

S. Charles Lee explained, ‘The show starts on the sidewalk.’54

Thousands of these lavish downtown palaces would close soon afterthe Depression hit in 1929, victims of financial pressures and a cultur-al turn against excess. An entirely new type now appeared, the neigh-bourhood theatre, a diminutive structure with 500–800 seats, unifiedfrom marquee to interiors with smooth industrial materials like steel,glass, concrete, chrome and Formica. An important early example ofthis shift had opened in 1929, as if on cue: the Film Guild Cinema inNew York’s Greenwich Village. Frederick Kiesler, yet another Vienneseémigré, considered cinema an art form that required silence and dark-ness to help audiences concentrate on the flat screen. His screen-o-scope, shaped like the human eye or a camera lens, included auxiliaryscreens (on the sides and ceiling) to become a total, interactive realm.In Kiesler’s view, ‘The entire building is a plastic medium dedicated tothe Art of Light ’– what he and Buckminster Fuller called ‘correalism’,an integral relationship between each object and its environment.55

The architects Ben Schlanger and John Eberson used a similar aesthet-ic for new movie theatres in the mid-1930s, eliminating the vestigialstage, the magnificent stairways, balconies and box seats. Schlangeralso emphasized the individual experience of cinema and his opposi-tion to class and ethnic divisions, a mood captured in the films ofCharlie Chaplin.

Few American architects of the 1920s were as daring as Kiesler, whorecognized theatricality as a means for unpredictable interaction, yetmany engaged similar themes. Modernity was an intoxicating excite-ment based on ‘mutability of environment’, wrote Janet Flanner in TheCubical City (1926).56 Despite its limitations, the private market exper-imented in many realms from skyscrapers and stores to housing, whilenon-profit institutions built model schools, hospitals and housing.Illusions of freedom and progress collapsed in disarray with the


Frederick Kiesler,Film Guild Cinema,New York City, 1929,street façade.

Film Guild Cinema,screening room.

Depression. Real change would come in 1932 – not with the momashow, but with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as President. fdrpromised a major federal investment in principles of equality andsocial justice, an ambitious goal often sustained by modern architec-ture. He chose the name for his campaign from a book, A New Deal(1932) by Stuart Chase, an economist in the rpaa, reminding us thatseemingly minor or idealistic efforts to rethink the environment canhave profound effects.


US Housing Authorityposter for LakeviewTerrace, a PWA-sponsored housingproject by Weinberg,Conrad & Teare,Cleveland, Ohio, 1934.

Franklin Roosevelt’s three-term presidency sustained the us through the‘long decade’ of the Great Depression and World War Two by ‘politiciz-ing the whole of American life’.1 The term liberal replaced progressive tocharacterize such interventions, determined in purpose, pragmatic instrategy, what fdr’s first inaugural address called direct action to achievedramatic results. The attorney Thurman Arnold first used the term ‘wel-fare state’ in 1937 to describe a fusing of ‘spiritual government’ and‘temporal government’ dependent on cultural as well as political fac-tors.2 Modern architecture, so critical to the New Deal’s goals, would bealtered by its processes. Approximately 90 per cent of the country’sarchitects and engineers were unemployed in the early 1930s, so eventhose few who never worked under governmental auspices were affect-ed by the momentous changes.

Three issues of relational aesthetics from this era still affect Americanarchitecture. First is the ambiguous tension between centralized powerand decentralization. Regionalist sympathies might derive from bull-headed backwardness, ‘earmarked’ Congressional funding orimaginative local knowledge. Second is an implied correlation betweenformal and political idioms – typically that Modernism is inherentlyprogressive while neo-traditionalism or neo-classicism is intrinsicallyfascist, though sometimes the inverse – when in fact all governmentsemploy a range of stylistic idioms.3 Third is the rhetorical excess ofpolemics, starting off as conspicuous hyperbole, but soon taken as self-evident truths. For example, one critic disparaged the Public WorksAdministration (pwa), a federal agency, for having set back modernAmerican architecture by not producing any masterpieces.4 But is archi-tecture a matter of exceptions or spectrums? And just how did thousandsof pwa projects preclude innovation?

Established meanings in the arts came under challenge from everydirection. The Popular Front called for intrepid graphic imagery thatcould rally the masses, while Ezra Pound demanded ‘Make It New!’ in1934.5 An experimental tone infused alternative magazines like Plus:

c h a p t e r f o u r

Architecture, the Public and theState, 1933–1945

Orientations of Contemporary Architecture, sponsored by ArchitecturalForum, and Task, by students from several Boston-area architectureschools. Others switched their titles and timbre. Buckminster Fullertransformed Philadelphia’s T-Square Club Journal into Shelter in 1932.The motto inveighed ‘Don’t Fight Forces; Use Them’, focusing on socialand ecological issues and occasionally showing a savage wit. The staidPencil Points became Progressive Architecture a decade later. Despite thecrises, the tone was surprisingly optimistic in all the journals. JosephHudnut, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, declared that‘Form is an expression of faith’ in a 1938 article entitled ‘ArchitectureDiscovers the Present’.6

Art museums new and old sponsored exhibitions on contemporarydesign, their first ventures into this realm. Rarely doctrinaire, theyencouraged discussion about forms, larger environments and theirimplications. By 1936 the new architecture curator at moma was vowingto ‘interrupt abstract arguments’ and replace them with ‘concreteexamples of new construction which may be of vast significance in thefuture’.7 An informal San Francisco group called Telesis, asked to mountan exhibition at the Museum of Art in 1940, supplemented familiardrawings of the generic urban environment ‘as it is’ and ‘as it could be’with open-ended questions for the public: ‘What is good housing?’ ‘Doyou like where you work?’ ‘Is this the best we can do?’8

The extensive deliberations rarely cited Johnson’s and Hitchcock’ssupposedly canonical exhibition. (Shelter ridiculed it relentlessly, andArchitectural Forum declared that if the ‘International Style’ was notbroad enough to include the diversity of recent American work, ‘this isthe fault of the term, not of the reality’.)9 It was Catherine Bauer’sModern Housing (1934) that taught Americans about progressive archi-tecture in Europe, which she described as ‘new form [and] joyous,extravagant creative élan’. A young and outspoken reformer, Bauerrejected simple solutions and formal typologies. Her constructive crit-icism noted the weaknesses as well as the strengths of iconic EuropeanSiedlungen, the new modern housing estates. Cautioning Americansnot to emulate work from abroad, she called for Modernisms in theplural, responsive to change, contingency and cultural diversity. Whynot combine ‘rational investigation’ with the ‘broad history of massemotion and popular desires’? Bauer would be a formidable presencefor three decades, challenging architects, museums and governmentagencies to experiment and then appraise the results, not just theintentions. Having helped draft the legislation that created publichousing, she would lambaste the effects of ‘towers-in-the-park’ twentyyears later.10

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New Deal programmes embraced American history, including nat-ural history, as ‘a useable past’ of wholes and parts, a resource forModernism, not an opposition. Lewis Mumford’s insightful study TheSouth in Architecture (1941) stressed the need to respect ‘the integrity’of regional elements based on local geographical and cultural condi-tions while always reaching for ‘the universal element [that]transcends the local, the limited, the partial’.11 The Historic AmericanBuilding Survey (habs) paid unemployed architects for measureddrawings; the Historic Sites Act then provided funds to purchase,maintain and interpret some of these properties. The selection por-trayed a diverse nation with multiple ethnic and regional vernaculars.New buildings did not have to emulate ‘historic shrines’. The privatesector followed a similar path. When the architect Mary Colter builtdramatic sites for tourists crafted from stone rubble near the GrandCanyon (1922–37), she insisted that her structures were ‘geological’, notreplicas or reproductions, even though they drew on Native Americanruins. ‘National Park Service rustic’ all too soon replicated this directaesthetic.12

The 1930s witnessed a convergence of social and ecological disastersthat converted environmentalism, formerly an elite pursuit, into a col-lective necessity. The problems encompassed every kind of setting.Homeless city-dwellers erected Hooverville shantytowns; abusive farm-ing and mining practices compounded the devastating effects of floods,droughts and erosion in the Midwestern Dust Bowl; developers’ crudelayouts had destroyed the promise of many suburbs. The idea of conser-vation in all these realms focused on large-scale environmentalstrategies. Indeed, the modern unit of design combined the region andthe planned community, interconnected with larger infrastructural net-works. Landscape architects now took a major role in design, notablyGarrett Eckbo, Daniel Kiley and Albert Mayer, all self-described mod-ernists. They emphasized ‘multiple-use planning’ that accepted flexibilityand mobility, showing how every milieu relates to fluctuating social andenvironmental systems.13

The artist Wolfgang Born praised ‘Geo-Architecture’ as ‘America’sContribution to the Art of the Future’, a fusion of built forms with dra-matic natural sites to highlight the power and fragility of the physicalworld.14 Architects around the country experimented with permeableskins and exoskeletons that could be adapted in response to site andclimatic changes. James Marston Fitch’s American Building (1947) praisedthese ‘environmental controls’.15 Given the tumult of the era, the searchfor equilibrium connected environmental factors with a desire for polit-ical and social harmony.

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The New Deal remains controversial in American political culture.Conservatives, aghast at radical interventions in a free-market economy,have recently tried to dismantle its welfare-state programmes like SocialSecurity, disaster relief and housing assistance. Liberal Americans, onceimpatient with Roosevelt’s ‘middle way’, are now fighting to preserve thatlegacy. The first hundred days of F.D.R.’s administration passed major leg-islation and created agencies like the pwa, the Civilian Conservation Corps(ccc) and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (fera). The prin-cipal goal was reducing unemployment, which hovered around 30 per centin large cities. ‘The pwa is essentially a creative agency,’ declared one pam-phlet; ‘it creates jobs, and it builds’.16 Build it did: over a six-year lifespanapproximately 34,000 buildings, including schools, courthouses, hospitals,recreational facilities, airports and housing. Major names like WilliamLescaze, George Elmslie, Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright joined theranks, though most designers were lesser-known figures who favoured‘pwa Moderne’. Given Washington politics, all but two of the nation’s morethan 3,000 counties requested and received some new structure. Life mag-azine declared this the greatest public building programme in the historyof humankind, even though costs ran to $4 billion.17

Work and Public Works

New Deal agencies provided the nation with public services that arenow too easily taken for granted. Three design tenets characterizedthe best work, all of them resonant in contemporary Modernism: skil-ful site planning, public access to virtually all projects and daringinterventions that also engaged local cultures. Collaboration definedthese endeavours, often to the point of anonymity within the ‘alpha-

bet agencies’. Architects worked closelywith engineers and landscape designersto upgrade the nation’s infrastructure,creating bold municipal incinerators,asphalt plants, water-treatment facilitiesand majestic parkways. Ancillary link-ages for the highway networks includedaccess ramps, toll booths, parking garagesand bus terminals. Almost 20,000 bridgeswere constructed throughout the coun-try, including the much-loved GoldenGate Bridge (1933–7) in San Francisco,designed by Irving and GertrudeMorrow.18

Samuel Wiener(Jones, Roessle,Olschner & Wiener)for the PWA, Municipal Incinerator,Shreveport,Louisiana, 1935.

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The pwa helped fund Robert Moses’s vast system of 3 bridges, 9 park-ways and 255 parks or recreational facilities throughout the New YorkMetropolitan Region. Here, too, results could be at once spartan andspectacular, for both individual structures and for the ambitious scale ofthe ensemble. When Aymar Embury ii, Moses’s favourite architect,completed the George Washington Bridge in 1931, he left the structure

Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Jacobs,Municipal AsphaltPlant, New York City,1944 (now AsphaltGreen Sports and Arts Center).

Aymar Embury, DwightJames Baum, and J.Weisberg for RobertMoses, New York CityCommissioner ofParks and the PWA,McCarren Pool entrypavilion, Brooklyn,1936 (now the JosephH. Lyons Pool).


exposed, discarding the neo-classical sheathing. Le Corbusier woulddeclare this ‘place of radiant grace’ his favourite building in the us, evi-dence of the nation’s ‘conviction and enthusiasm’ for the new.19 Mosestoo remains a subject of passionate debate. Admirers point to accom-plishments that transformed New York, benefitting many middle-classcitizens, and broke through bureaucratic roadblocks that usually stymieambitious master plans. Critics cannot forget that Moses wielded politi-cal power like an omnipotent pharaoh, never elected to office andcontemptuous of public opinion. Moses used his authority to demolishworking-class neighbourhoods that stood in his way and further segre-gate African-Americans, who did not fit into his grandiose vision.20 Hisexample forces architects, developers and citizens everywhere to ask if thevirtuous goals of Modernism justify the means by which it is realized.

Other government agencies also employed architecture and the arts.The Works Progress Administration (wpa) took the lead with 188,000new and renovated public buildings and infrastructure services. ItsFederal Art Project engaged all types of media. Writers were paid to tourtheir states and produce travel guides; musicians and actors to entertainevery social group; graphic designers to produce posters; painters andsculptors to embellish public spaces. Although the goal of ‘art for themillions’ favoured easily comprehensible documentaries, social realismand stripped-down classicism, the post-war caricature of insipid repre-

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87 Robert Moses’sNew York, showingthe Henry HudsonParkway (1933–7)(foreground) and theCross-BronxExpressway leadingto the GeorgeWashington Bridge(1927–31), rendering,1955.

sentational art is exaggerated. Many administrators were cautious aboutany Modernism that seemed coded or self-consciously difficult. Yetmodern architects designed important buildings, and major abstraction-ists like Stuart Davis painted striking murals. The subtle distortions of‘dynamic realism’, ‘social surrealism’ and recycled materials (a favouritefor wpa theatres) critiqued entrenched power and artistic fashions.21

The Tennessee Valley Authority (tva) received considerable nation-al and international praise. Extending across a 1,500-kilometre-longswath of land and waterways, the tva provided residents of sevenimpoverished Appalachian states with an integrated system of electricalpower, flood control, communication, conservation, employment andrecreation. Director Arthur Morgan wanted an ‘architecture of publicrelations’ to fulfill his vision of a ‘laboratory in social and economiclife’.22 He appointed the young Hungarian émigré Roland Wank asprincipal designer after hearing him criticize the Army Corps ofEngineers’ designs for folksy buildings and ornamented dams. Wankcalled for prefabricated housing and forthright volumes as more inkeeping with the spectacular natural settings. An exhibition of 1941 atmoma featured Wank’s seven majestic hydroelectric dams, eleven

Roland Wank for the TVA, powerhouseand gantry crane,Kentucky Dam,1939–44.


tributary dams, powerhouses andgantry cranes. Three years later anothermoma exhibition asserted that the tva’sstructures ‘combine[d] to form one ofthe monuments of our civilization’.23

The project was orchestrated fromeach detail to the totality, ‘one unifiedmachine, one organic whole’, in thewords of the tva economist StuartChase.24 Every aspect was geared toimpress the press and the public. Eachdam incorporated adjacent sites forrecreation. A sequence of views alongnew roadways built expectations, andthe striking visitor centres orchestrated

enticing spectacles. Careful site planning softened the monotony of pre-fabricated trailers and standardized permanent dwellings in the newtown of Norris, Tennessee. Nonetheless, the ‘socialist’ premises of pub-lic ownership curtailed the ambitious goal of the tva as a prototype forcooperative ecological settlements elsewhere. Nor were all the locals socontent. Lewis Hine, hired to document the dramatic changes to a ‘back-ward’ way of life, observed that most people resented ‘the rapid and, tosome, shocking transition to a new era’.25 Norris would later be criticizedas a suburb in the wilderness.

Industrial designers conjured up products at all scales, includingbuildings at world’s fairs that drew consumers by recasting technologicalfantasies as voluptuous modern power. The role of the media continuedto expand as radio stations multiplied with the popularity of fdr’s‘Fireside Chats’. Crowds in Los Angeles flocked to two rival networks onSunset Boulevard: William Lescaze’s sleek ‘International’ broadcast sta-tion for cbs and the Austin Company’s glass-brick Moderne building fornbc. Film production concentrated in Hollywood, where studios builtnew headquarters, but the real excitement occurred on the back lots. Amajor studio now produced some 40 films a year with extravagant setstypically designed by young architects with a penchant for cosmopolitanmodern decor, high-tech imagery and lavish fantasy settings. The artdirector Stephen Goosson combined the urban visions of Le Corbusierand Hugh Ferriss for Just Imagine (1930). His utopian Shangri-La for LostHorizon (1937) mixed Europe’s cubic volumes with an elegant horizontal-ity and landscaping reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s own Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine,Wisconsin (1936–9), embodied the New Deal’s call for enlightened work

Prefabricated trailersnear Fontana Dam,Tennessee, c. 1939.

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relations. The commission conveyed a sense of redemption: a suddeneconomic surge for a company that had refused to fire employees; a last-minute shift by chief executives who had first commissioned a prosaicdesign; proof of the phoenix-like revival of Wright’s career. The daringstructural system used mushroom-columns made of concrete rein-forced with steel mesh, expanding at the top like lily pads some 6 metresin diameter, then tapering down to delicate bases set in hinged 23-centi-metre metal supports that Wright called ‘crow’s feet’. The WisconsinIndustrial Commission was highly suspicious and demanded proof thatthis system could carry the weight of the roof. Wright complied, ever thevirtuoso performer, loading the test column with 60 tons of sandbagsand rocks, five times the required weight, to the delight of reporters whocovered the event.

Equally inspired was the use of standard Pyrex-glass tubing to fill theinterstices between the lily pads and within the red-brick walls. Theworkspace is suffused with natural light during the day; the exterior isluminous at night. As in the Larkin Building, mezzanines looked outover the main workspace as they connected a multi-level assemblage ofoffices, laboratories and other facilities. In another prophetic gesture,

Frank Lloyd Wright,Johnson WaxAdministrationBuilding, Racine,Wisconsin, 1936–9,view of the GreatHall.


the lobby flowed directly into a cave-like garage. When the entire citywas invited to the opening in 1939, over a third of the population cameto marvel at the Great Workroom. Wright considered it as inspiring ‘asany cathedral’. American Business acclaimed the ‘uplifting repose’, andLife called the project a harbinger of things to come, more propheticthan the New York World’s Fair.26

Housing in Hard Times

Now in his sixties, Wright imagined himself reinventing every aspect ofAmerican society. Broadacre City captures the scope of that ambition.The idea had emerged in the late 1920s, but remained purely rhetoricaluntil the New York Times asked him for a counter-proposal to LeCorbusier’s Ville Radieuse in 1932. ‘Ruralism as distinguished fromUrbanisme’, Wright declared, describing an immense harmonized planthat would, he hoped, encompass the entire nation – or any other coun-try that might be interested. A 1.1-metre-square model, a prototypeutopia for some 4,000 people, was displayed at Rockefeller Center in1935 and then travelled to other cities. Broadacre celebrated the auto-mobile as the vehicle for freedom and a return to the land, ‘minimum ofone acre to the family’.27 Occasional towers and malls provided points ofconcentration for commerce, culture and government within the vastdispersed landscape. Megalomaniac and environmentally unsound,an artistically coordinated sprawl, Broadacre paradoxically sought toharness the forces of mass production, automobiles and telecommuni-cations – a decentralized but synchronized vision of modernity that stillremains potent for many Americans.

It was not this grand project, but an extraordinary country house,Fallingwater, that ensured Wright’s fame. Edgar Kaufmann, scion ofPittsburgh’s largest department store, commissioned the family hide-away at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, late in 1934. He supposedly did so at thebehest of his son, who had just become an apprentice at Taliesin (work-ing on the Broadacre City model), although the opposite may be true. Inany case, Fallingwater, completed in 1937, soon became the most famousmodern house in the us and probably in the world. A drawing of ithangs behind Wright on the 1938 cover of Time magazine. A Wrightianmyth suggests that he designed Fallingwater in only two hours, althoughhe visited the site many times. In any case the design never changed afterthe initial proposal, which surpassed all possible expectations even in itslocation, straddling and possessing the small waterfall rather than mere-ly looking out upon it. Like so many of Wright’s designs, the structuretranscends oppositions. It seems at once a natural formation, anchored

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to the earth by vertical piers of local sandstone, and a daring tour deforce. Reinforced-concrete slabs cantilever out 4.5 metres from the rockshelf, then realign with the streambed. Those floating planes make thisrelatively small dwelling feel expansive. They suggest that Wright hadstudied the European modernists he so disdained, although Fallingwateris unquestionably site-specific even in its cultural location, at onceenhancing nature and wrestling with it. The experience is magical,encompassing both the permanence and the impermanence of creativityand the natural world.28

Wright continued to advocate high-quality affordable housing with anew moniker, ‘Usonian’, alluding simultaneously to the us, to the tech-nocratic acronyms of New Deal agencies and to his friend BuckminsterFuller’s Dymaxion schemes. Like other modern dwelling types,Usonians maximized economy and reduced area. Wright experimentedwith several basic modules, typically a grid of rectangles offset by diag-onals, but also circles and hexagons. Shallow concrete-slab foundationscontained radiant heating, which also prevented frost heaves in cold cli-mates. External structure and internal finish became a single layer,usually brick or wood-frame, left exposed and reinforced with built-instorage to stiffen single-storey walls. Wright nestled some delightful spa-tial experience in every dwelling, what he called ‘essential Joy’, perhapssimply dappled sunlight through geometric fretwork on a thin plane ofinexpensive plywood. Each house balanced ecological and social harmonywith individuality and even hedonistic delight.

The Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, designed for two ‘commonsense’ young professionals, was the archetypal Usonian (1936–7). Itsinclusive modernity maximized economy and flexibility without sacrific-ing familiarity or comfort. ‘What are the essentials in their case, a typicalcase?’ Wright asked readers of Architectural Forum.29 He then specifiedthree experience-based criteria for the modern dwelling: a transparentwall of glass to connect the living area with a small enclosed garden; acompact ‘work-space’ (aka kitchen) to form a service core, replacing thehearth as a spatial fulcrum; and a carport to shelter the automobile, nowfully integrated into the family dwelling. All three would become normsfor the best post-World War Two suburban houses.

Wright’s houses remind us that residential building continueddespite the Depression. Indeed, government subsidies focused over-whelmingly on the private sector, seeking to revive and modernize thiscritical segment of the economy. The Federal Housing Administration(fha), created in 1934, guaranteed mortgage loans for banks andimproved the terms for owners. As hoped, housing starts quickly rosefor the first time in eight years. The fha soon financed almost half the


Frank Lloyd Wright,Herbert JacobsHouse, Madison,Wisconsin, 1936, living room.

Jacobs House, floor plan.

country’s mortgages, investing more than $4 billion in the next six yearsand prompting most banks to follow its guidelines.30 Both the numbersand the architecture have usually been ignored. Local fha officials wereoften cautious about the re-sale value of ‘non-traditional’ styles or pro-grammes, but a shift in public taste saw modern houses becomeincreasingly popular, ‘no longer the frigid white symbol of a small cult’in the words of Architectural Forum.31 Far more problematic was thefha’s endorsement of racial segregation as part of sound ‘neighbour-hood planning’ – a position that lasted until 1968.

Modern American dwellings shared an attitude towards domesticitymore than a stylistic idiom. An open flow of space on the ground floorreinforced informality and the continuities of an ‘indoor–outdoorhouse’. Industrialized systems of construction joined with simple, tactilenatural materials, often drawn from the local landscape: wide cedarand spruce planks in the Pacific North-west, blank stucco walls in theSouth-west, rough fieldstone in Pennsylvania, clapboard siding inNew England. The Modern House in America, a popular compendium,emphasized such regional adaptations, dismissing the InternationalStyle as a misnomer for copyists. One of the editors, Katherine MorrowFord, insisted that ‘modern architecture cannot be reduced to a preciseformula.’32 Hybridity rather than purity seemed the fitting expression ofAmerican culture, unpredictable amalgams of tradition and innovation,local and universal, personal and collective.

Walter Gropius had been intrigued by the idea of ‘light construction,full of bright daylight’ since his early days at the Bauhaus in Germany.

Walter Gropius withMarcel Breuer,Gropius House,Lincoln,Massachusetts, 1937,garden façade.


After the Nazis seized power, he emigrated to England and then, in 1937,to the us, where he was invited to chair the Architecture Department atHarvard. The next year he designed his own house in suburban Lincoln,Massachusetts, partnering with the Hungarian Marcel Breuer for thisand several other residences. If the Bauhaus remains present in the whiteplanes, transparent glass walls and flat roof, which caused squawks fromneighbours, the two colleagues eagerly incorporated local clapboard andfieldstone,as well as that all-American vernacular element, the screenedporch. ‘There is no such thing as an “International Style”,’ Gropius insisted.‘The fusion . . . produced a house that I would never have built in Europewith its entirely different climatic, technical and psychological back-ground.’33 Gropius asserted a more stringent philosophy in his teaching.Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Self-Reliance’, he urged studentsto break with architectural history in order to become leaders for thefuture. Since Modernism was by now accepted, even triumphant, inmost American schools by the late 1930s, the Gropius crusade fostered

Harwell HamiltonHarris, Havens House,Berkeley, California,1939, photograph byMan Ray.

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missionary zeal rather than the ‘humanistic’ or ‘democratic’ aspirationsfor ‘diversity’ of his writings.

American Modernism remained strongly regional throughout the1930s. California continued to foster exceptional creativity. Neutra andSchindler in Los Angeles were joined by a second generation thatincluded Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano and J. R. Davison. Cliff Mayreinterpreted local history with the vaguely modern, low-lying ranchhouse, while Albert Frey cultivated cosmopolitan flash at the desertresort of Palm Springs. Cohorts in the Bay Area interpreted theirregion’s informal, nature-infused ‘simple life’ with redwood siding,abundant glass and dramatic angles. The San Francisco Museum of Artheld special exhibitions in 1942 and 1949 to promote ‘Bay AreaDomestic Architecture’ by William Wurster, Harwell Hamilton Harris,Gardner Dailey, John Funk and others. Less well known outside theirlocales are Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon in the Pacific North-west;Kraetsch & Kraetsch and Alden Dow in the upper Midwest; HarrisArmstrong in Missouri; Victorine and Samuel Homsey in Delaware;and Igor Polivitsky, Robert Law Weed and Lawrence Murray Dixon in Florida.

Climatic adaptations determined Weed’s Florida Tropical Home inChicago’s 1933 Century of Progress exhibition. The house’s solar orien-tation, cross-ventilation and concrete canopies (‘eyebrows’) to shadewindows remained mainstays of modern houses in that state until themid-1950s. George Fred Keck’s path was more indirect. He realized thatthe glass walls of his House of Tomorrow at the 1933 Chicago exhibitionkept the workmen comfortable despite the bitter Midwestern winter.Keck and his brother William immediately began to experiment withpassive solar orientation and flexible louvres in houses and apartmentbuildings, keenly aware of aesthetic as well as physical effects. Whenlocal developer Howard Sloan commissioned a home just outsideChicago in 1940, the Kecks enlisted producers to meet their specifica-tions for radiant floor heating, ventilation louvres, insulation materialsand Thermopane windows. Two years later Sloan renamed his develop-ment Solar Park and required that all new architecture be ‘modern’ –that is, architect-designed with climatic adaptations.

Fortune magazine now defined American modern housing as ‘inventive,industrially produced, and resourceful’ about environments.34 The editorsclearly saw a business potential that has returned in recent years. Theappearance and purpose of windows changed when the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company launched ‘The Picture Window Idea’ in the early1930s, emphasizing large, unobstructed expanses of glass to frame views ofthe outdoors.35 The popular shelter press hailed this ‘Modern Miracle’, and


architects experimented with solar orientation. Two of the most significantwere finished just after the war. Eleanor Raymond and Dr Maria Telkes,director of mit’s solar laboratory, collaborated on a Solar House with earlyphotovoltaic panels (1948). That same year, Frank Lloyd Wright finishedanother home for the Jacobs family in Middleton, Wisconsin, named theSolar Hemicycle for its arc of windows facing a sun-catching sunken basin.The earth for the basin became a protective berm that blocked north windsin the winter. Ingenuity balanced wizardry.

The Depression gave considerable impetus to prefabrication – acatchword for an array of processes and products. Innovative researchwas often affiliated with universities and government agencies such asthe Forest Products Laboratory. By 1935, 33 private companies had gen-erated unique systems based on stressed-skin plywood, modular steel

Richard Neutra, VDL

Research House, LosAngeles, 1932, inLibbey-Owens-Fordadvertisement fromHome and Garden(May 1934).

Keck & Keck, Keck Gottschalk KeckApartment, Chicago,1937, dining room ofFred Keck apartment.


frames or steel frames with asbestos-cement panels. Two architects foundedmajor firms: Howard Fisher’s GeneralHouses and Robert McLaughlin’sAmerican Houses, known for its steel-frame Moto-Home, purportedly easy toexpand or move and equipped with a‘mechanical core’. Marketing for modernhouses routinely evoked the automobileindustry, which continued to expandwithout major advances.

Collaboration was an ideal if not a real-ity. Robert Davison linked the PierceFoundation with Columbia University’s

Institute for Housing Research. He hired sociologists to analyse changingpatterns in consumerism and family life at Pierce Heights nearHightstown, New Jersey, and building-materials companies to help devel-op products like Cemesto (thin sandwich panels with layeredasbestos-and-fibre insulation), soon a standard material. BuckminsterFuller’s second Dymaxion dwelling was one of several mast-houses duringthe 1930s. Many architects were drawn to ‘shape engineering’ (a termderived from the curve of an aircraft fuselage), such as Corwin Willson’sEggshell trailer-house, Martin Wagner’s Iron Igloo and Wallace Neff ’sBubble House, produced by spraying concrete over inflated rubber bal-loons. None of these went beyond a few prototypes since inventive formstrumped issues of production. Konrad Wachsman and Walter Gropius setout to make a ‘packaged house’ for the General Panel Corporation, butWachsman kept redesigning the purpose-made components, aiming for anideal system, so that after four years not one house had been completed.

Wherever possible, modern dwellings were organized into enclaveswith careful attention to landscaping. The most powerful examples werethe New Deal’s three Greenbelt Towns, begun in 1935 as self-sufficient sub-urban towns surrounded by 0.8-kilometre-wide protective greenswards inthe tradition of English Garden Cities and Radburn. Greenbelt, outsideWashington, was the most ambitiously modern in its clusters of attachedhousing and communal outdoor areas. It provided an important modelfor New Towns in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Miami and Miami Beach filled with blocks of simple Art Deco gar-den apartments, carefully sited for sun-control and cross-ventilation.Privately owned low-rise garden apartments in Los Angeles includedNeutra’s Strathmore and Landfair, as well as Gregory Ain’s DunsmuirFlats in Los Angeles (1937), admired for the varied façades that adapt to

Robert McLaughlinfor American Houses,Inc., Moto-Home, NewLondon, Connecticut,1933–4.

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the site. Smooth horizontal planes faced one street, garages another,while step-backed façades opened onto small private gardens, providingabundant light on three sides of each unit. Even mass-market builderslike Fritz Burns of southern California emphasized the need to think ofstreetscapes and ‘architectural sequencing’.

Housing the ‘Common Man’

The New Deal also saw the first federal efforts to address the injustice of‘one-third of a nation, ill-housed’, in the words of fdr’s second inaugu-ral address in 1936. The total numbers are small: just over 21,000 units in51 projects under the pwa; 2,200 in the three suburban greenbelt towns;

Gregory Ain,Dunsmuir Flats garden apartments,Los Angeles, 1937,garden façade.


and another 120,000 units under the Housing Authority (usha) beforeWorld War Two – many fewer than planned and meagre in comparisonwith some 4.5 million new units in Europe.36 American housing usuallyincorporated familiar tropes from local surroundings, in part to deflectpublic suspicion about such interventions. Pressure from realtors andreformers required slum clearance, demolishing at least one existingunit for every new one. Few of the evicted families could afford the newgovernment housing, which was geared to the ‘middle third’, the out-of-luck ‘deserving poor’. With this combination of reforms the nation’spoor often saw their housing options plummet.

All the same, the architectural quality and site plans of the best pwahousing remain inspiring. A commitment to jobs brought high-qualitycraftsmanship in a range of materials. Realizing that ‘Housing Is Morethan Houses’, Washington added facilities for leisure, recreation andsocial services. Designers engaged the landscape, drawing on trends inSwiss and Scandinavian housing, as well as Ernst May’s work inFrankfurt, Germany. The site plans accentuated four qualities: irregularsuper-blocks with low-rise, low-coverage building groups; continuitywith surrounding streets and buildings; adaptation to the distinctivecontours of the landscape; and inviting spaces between buildings.Educators debated the relationship between the rigorous minimalist aes-thetic of Europe’s Modern Movement and a more ‘humanized’ informalvariety in the us. Harvard Dean Joseph Hudnut, responsible for bring-ing Gropius to the design school, now implicitly criticized him whenHudnut derided ‘plumbing, fresh air and prophylactic calm’ as sanitizedideals imposed on working-class families. In the ultimate insult, he calledGropius’ approach to Modernism more suburban than urban.37

The Carl Mackley Houses in north-eastern Philadelphia remainappealing more than 70 years later. Adaptation to circumstances charac-terized the project from the start. Catherine Bauer represented theclient, a local branch of the hosiery-makers’ union. The principal archi-tect, Oskar Stonorov, a recent émigré from Germany, presented oneversion of the project for the Philadelphia venue of moma’s ModernArchitecture exhibition in 1932. In keeping with recent avant-gardetrends, this model featured ten-storey Zeilenbau rows – rigid diagonalslabs orientated to maximize sunlight and fresh air. Stonorov knewenough not to show this version to union officials. His partner, AlfredKastner, oversaw the massing and site layout, converting the unrelentingshapes to irregular three-storey blocks. The buildings rise and fall withthe gently sloping site, punctuated by passageways, balconies and smallrecessed spaces around stair landings. Even colour softened asStonorov’s original white walls gave way to industrial tiles in autumnal

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Oskar Stonorov andAlbert Kastner forthe PWA, MackleyHouses, Philadelphia,1932–5, axonometricdrawing fromArchitectural Record(February 1934).

Mackley Houses,photographed in 1985.

shades of orange, tan and mauve, consistent with the multi-hued brickof Philadelphia’s row-house vernacular. The unit sizes were meagre, butgenerous public amenities included childcare facilities, a swimmingpool, meeting rooms, an underground garage and rooftop laundries.38

New York experimented in multiple veins. Frederick Ackerman’s FirstHouses alternated rehabilitation and demolition along one dilapidatedblock of East Village tenements. The Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn(originally the Ten Eyck) comprised the largest and most costly pwaproject. William Lescaze, chief designer under R. R. Shreve, organizedthe ten-block site into three super-blocks with Zeilenbau slabs set 15degrees off the grid. Bravado overruled climate studies, since the court-yards become wind channels in winter and block summer breezes.Nonetheless, the bold horizontal stripes and handsome communityservices cultivated a sense of local pride. Harlem River Houses respondeddirectly to local residents’ demands, articulated by the ConsolidatedTenants League. Designed by Archibald Manning Brown with JohnLouis Wilson, an African-American architect, the series of walkways andcourtyards connects the project with the surrounding streets.39 AnotherAfrican-American architect, Hilyard Robinson, enlivened flat-roofedInternational Style buildings at Langston Terrace (1938) in Washington,dc, with bas-relief ornament and informal placement around a centralcourtyard on a naturally terraced slope.

‘New groups and classes are knocking at the door,’ explained a 1936article in the Record, ‘asking as of right what used to be the privileges ofthe few.’40 Good intentions to be sure, but when American public hous-ing became official in 1937 with the Wagner-Steagall Act standardsplummeted. usha set policy and funding in Washington while localauthorities chose locations and interpreted the guidelines. Unlike the

Burton Cairns andVernon DeMars forthe FSA, migrant workers’ housing atChandler, Arizona,1936.

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pwa most projects were not so much restrained as resentful, even mean-spirited. This was not the fault of ‘Modernism’, but of specific repressivepolicies. Congressional pressure imposed draconian restrictions on con-struction costs and standards to make it clear that public housing wasinferior to the lowest-quality private housing.41

The Farm Security Administration (fsa) was the most radical andunequivocally modern federal housing agency. The fsa built 95 commu-nities for migrant farm workers from California to Texas. The justlyfamous photographs of the migrants by Dorothea Lange and othersdramatized the poignant dignity of these impoverished families that fledthe Midwestern Dust Bowl. The architecture, while far less well known,parlayed similar emotions into redressing some of the problems.California’s regional office insisted on considerable autonomy for itsprincipal designers, Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars, who mixedsources from European housing estates and Israeli kibbutzim withAmerican garden-apartments and local vernacular traditions.42

Inexpensive materials predominated by necessity and predilection: ply-wood, asbestos cement, prefabricated aluminium panels and traditionaladobe bricks.

fsa layouts varied as well, using Zeilenbau rows, hexagons, culs-de-sac and differing combinations from neighbourhood to neighbour-hood. Interviews generated multi-bedroom units for extended familiesat the end of large rows and designated spaces for baseball, weekenddances and teenagers’ drag races. The landscape architect Garrett Eckboplaced schools, childcare, health centres and other community build-ings near existing groves of trees. Cross-ventilation, walls of windowsand covered walkways provided further relief from oppressive heat.The architectural media were resoundingly enthusiastic, as was theSwiss critic Albert Roth, who included the fsa camp at Chandler,Arizona, in Modern Architecture (1940), the quintessential text forEuropean modernists. Two decades later, Architectural Record declaredthat these fsa images were part of ‘the collective subconscious of theModern Movement’.43

Public Spaces of ‘Better Living’

Some private businesses prospered as ad men of the mid-1930s inventedtwo still-potent phrases ‘Better Living’ and ‘American Way of Life’.Southern cities began to promote their assets, laying foundations for theSunbelt’s post-war growth. Los Angeles continued to thrive in myth andfact, a new breed of modern city, seemingly amorphous in its far-flung dispersal. Aircraft and automobile factories appeared on the city’s


periphery even before the war, along withplanned housing enclaves. Popular touristattractions multiplied – drive-ins, motorinns, the Farmer’s Market, Crossroads ofthe World – while cosmopolitan shopsand department stores flourished alongWilshire and other major boulevards.

Government agencies funded the mostimportant public buildings of the 1930s,often combining structures with sites tobring citizens together for a variety ofactivities, planned and spontaneous.Some were grand, like the Red RocksAmphitheater near Denver (1941), with itsexcellent natural acoustics for 9,000 peo-ple at a spectacular site carved fromsandstone monoliths. Most projects werecomparatively small, sheds for classical-music festivals and infill communitycentres in urban neighbourhoods.

Waterfront development on ocean and river sites combined ecologicaladaptations with public recreation. City and state parks added swim-ming pools, field houses, playgrounds and band shells to serve largecrowds. Resort towns like Stowe, Vermont, improved their ski trails atpublic expense.

San Antonio’s Paseo del Alamo, or Riverwalk, has its origins here in aprocess that illustrates similar ventures elsewhere. Aware that the river inthe centre of town had become an open sewer prone to dangerousfloods, the local architect Robert Hugman had first envisioned a plan in1929. A decade later, a newly elected Democratic mayor secured gener-ous federal funding from the wpa. By 1941 the city had a bypass channelfor flood control, 21 blocks of landscaped walkways, 31 stairways to theriver’s edge, 21 handsome bridges, shops and a large amphitheatre acrossthe river from a stage for plays and films. O’Neill Ford restored the near-by La Villita, centre of the original Mexican settlement, under theauspices of the National Youth Administration (nya), which soonbecame Lyndon Johnson’s first political base.

The New Deal dramatically increased the number and quality ofAmerican schools and modernized their pedagogies, giving assertivearchitectural expression to theories of progressive education. Modernpre-schools were both rational and lyrical. Neutra’s prototype ring-planschool from ‘Rush City Reformed’ remained on paper until a school

Arneson RiverTheater at Paseo delAlamo Riverwalk, SanAntonio, Texas,Robert Hugman forWorks ProgressAdministration (WPA),1929–41, photographc. 1960.

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principal in Bell, California, campaigned to see it realized in 1935. CrowIsland School (1940) in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago,became a nationwide model for decades to come. The design was a col-laboration between Eliel Saarinen, his son Eero, the Chicago firm ofPerkins, Wheeler and Will, and Carleton Washburne, the school super-intendent whose influential Winnetka Plan loosened strict separations

Saarinen andSaarinen withPerkins, Wheeler and Will, Crow IslandSchool, Winnetka,Illinois, 1940.

Crow Island School,plan.


between grades and between curricularsubjects. ‘Activity classrooms’ encouragedvarious pursuits and flowed into age-grouped outdoor spaces. Simple brickworkand local wood reinforced the spirit of joy-ful resourcefulness. John Dewey providedthe philosophical grounding: these schoolswere social centres for the entire commu-nity, their indoor and outdoor facilitiesopen round the clock.

High schools were more imposingstructures. While some held fast to theneo-Georgian style, many New Dealschools combined modern functionalismwith Moderne streamlining. A moma exhi-bition on schools in 1942 featuredexamples that had also appeared, withoutthe architects’ names, in pwa publications.Lescaze’s Ansonia High School inColdspring, Connecticut (1939), was a res-olute steel-framed structure articulatingthe separation of three units (auditorium,classrooms and gymnasium), with smooth

bands of glass block and salmon-colored brick to enliven the façade.Architectural design became more abstract with an early bubble dia-gram about school activities in William Caudill’s pamphlet ‘Space forTeaching’ (1941). But rhetoric about straightforward plainness and func-tional plans sometimes disguised class and racial prejudice. Since theconstruction and maintenance of American schools are tied to propertytaxes, poor districts suffer calculated cutbacks in architecture and edu-cational services, while prosperous suburbs enjoy good facilities.

Several independent architecture schools took up the modernist causewhile asserting distinctive philosophical goals. Frank Lloyd Wright’sTaliesin West in Arizona is at once a formal statement with its diagonalgeometry and an informal ensemble determined by topography and site.After a three-year search during respites from the harsh Wisconsin win-ters, Wright found the site in Paradise Valley. Planning evolved in situbeginning in January 1938. Apprentices made the walls of ‘desert rubblestone’, mixed with cement and cured in wooden moulds, creating a tex-tured material that seems primeval. Regular rows of rough-sawnredwood trusses are angled to echo the mountains in the distance andsupport the roof, much of it originally covered in taut canvas. One terrace

‘Space RelationDiagram’ from WilliamCaudill’s pamphlet‘Space for Teaching’(1941).

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incorporated a petroglyph boulder found nearby, suggesting archaic cre-ative forces as well as modern innovations. Like Taliesin East inWisconsin, this ‘desert compound’ encompassed home, work, school andcommunity life for the Taliesin Fellowship and their visitors. It would bea formative place for many creative architects who were apprenticedthere, including John Lautner, Alden Dow, Paolo Soleri, Henry Klumband the iconoclastic moma curator Elizabeth Mock.


Frank Lloyd Wright,Taliesin West,Scottsdale, Arizona,1938–59.

Taliesin West, interior of studio.

Mies van der Rohe,Alumni Memorial Hall,IIT, 1947, corner detail.

Mies van der Rohe,Illinois Institute ofTechnology (IIT),1943–7, photo-montage with modelof campus.

Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology (iit) representsa seemingly opposite but parallel approach to education and environ-ments. If Wright connected to myth and place, so did Mies with histimeless classical abstraction. Both shut out the inconsistencies of reality.This commission brought Mies to the us in 1937, when Chicago’sArmour Institute, soon renamed iit, hired him to direct its School ofArchitecture and create a prestigious new campus. He sketched the rig-orous site plan of parallel rows the next year, then set it on a plinth andslightly modulated the uncompromising uniformity during the waryears. Mies’s devotion to Baukunst, a famously untranslatable Germanterm, elevated customary skills and well-established rules to attain aspiritual ideal. iit gave substance to his declaration, paraphrasingThomas Aquinas, that ‘truth is the significance of facts’.44

Seemingly oblivious to the site, Mies in fact sought to evoke the‘material and spiritual conditions’ of Chicago’s grid.45 Fascinated byAmerican building methods, his reiterated materials celebrated com-monplace stock items. The Minerals and Metals Research Building(1941–3) established a basic prototype of large-span interiors with lowbrick-and-glass curtain walls. The strategically exposed i-beams were infact welded to the corner columns, a symbolic expression of structurethat Mies continued to use in later buildings. Despite protests neitherMies nor the iit trustees worried that construction forced demolition ofthe Mecca, an apartment building that had been at the heart of Chicago’sAfrican-American cultural ‘Renaissance’. This provided another layer ofwhat Sarah Whiting has called iit’s ‘bas-relief urbanism’, simultaneouslyfigural and abstract, sitting lightly on the ground yet incised into the cityfabric. In all these ways iit anticipated post-war redevelopment.46

Deploying Modern Architecture

The American economy rebounded in 1939 as the government andmajor industries geared up to help the European Allied powers fight theNazis. The American ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ doubled the output of air-craft and munitions factories even before the us officially entered thecombat. The nation declared war in December 1941, the day after theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor. First 10 million, then 20 millionAmericans enlisted. Almost as many joined the war effort at home byhelping produce ships, planes and munitions in 46 different locations.Flight schools and air stations proliferated. Fighting on two fronts,across the Atlantic and the Pacific, required a coordinated nationaleffort, one that would have an extraordinary effect on the post-wareconomy and, by extension, on architecture.


The scale and coordination ofwartime production altered everyindustry from weaponry to buildingmaterials. A hundred major corpora-tions received two-thirds of governmentcontracts, names like General Electric,Chrysler, Boeing, Westinghouse andKaiser. Nearly a thousand automotiveplants converted to war work. The mili-tary commissioned new factories, portfacilities, supply depots and airports,most of them colossal. The world’slargest aircraft plant, the Dodge enginefactory in Chicago, designed by AlbertKahn and constructed by the GeorgeFuller Company (1943), had an area of600,000 square metres, almost half as

much floor space as the entire industry in 1940.47 As plants grew expo-nentially larger, engineers calibrated the fabrication of tanks andbombers down to the square centimetre of space. The AustinCompany, famous for its industrial buildings, designed and built‘blackout’ factories with ‘breathable’ walls and luminous surfaces thatcould function on minimal electric light.

With several billion dollars allocated to scientific research, universi-ties and industrial consortiums built sophisticated laboratories to studyradar, rocketry and jet propulsion. New synthetics replaced criticalmatériel like steel, aluminium and rubber, leading Newsweek to proclaima ‘New Era in Plastics’ in 1943.48 Sponsored-research laboratories at theDow and DuPont chemical companies invented fibreglass, styrofoamfoam cores and clear acrylics for pressure-sealed aircraft radomes. Newresins made plywood more durable, while laminated-timber columnsand trusses extended across astounding distances. Navy airship hangarsused prefabricated wooden arches to break previous records for timberspans. Since wartime culture ‘made do’ with scarce resources, recycleddebris became Homasote, a wallboard of wood pulp and ground news-paper bound with resin.

The Navy Seabees included more than a thousand architects. (Theword Seabees spells out the acronym for their official name,Construction Battalions). They designed ingenious systems and uniquestructures that made a virtue of necessity by improvising with the mate-rials at hand. Quonset huts represent a similar team effort, created by ateam of Navy architects in just one month, April 1941, at Quonset Point

‘Housing: An IntegralPart of Total Defense’,Pencil Points(February 1941).

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Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. Made of lightweight corrugated steel,Quonsets were stackable, easy to assemble and highly adaptable. Morethan 170,000 were produced in over 80 different plans and sizes duringthe war, for use as hospitals, hangars, housing and storage units aroundthe world. Even the earliest schemes featured insulation layers and con-necting units.

The Quonset hut’s success can be attributed in part to its corporate pro-ducers. George Fuller, a leading Chicago contractor, initiated the process,while Stran-Steel was a well-known manufacturer. Buckminster Fullerinvented something remarkably similar in 1941, the DymaxionDeployment Unit, a minimal mobile dwelling that went on display atmoma. A few hundred were produced before restrictions on sheet steelwere imposed. Quonsets were even more versatile, however, especially inthe hands of imaginative designers. Bruce Goff joined the Seabees and usedthem extensively, most famously to renovate and build new structures atCamp Parks, a Seabee base near San Francisco, in 1944. The Seabee Chapelcombined two ‘elephant huts’ with masonry walls and surplus or scavenged

Austin Company, climate-controlledConsolidated-VulveeAircraft ‘Blackout’Plant, Fort Worth,Texas, 1942, partialview of interior.


materials.49 ‘Any materials were fair, old or new,’ he explained; ‘we had toreevaluate them to use them in ways that seem fresh and valid’.50

Some 9 million people moved to the booming coastal cities and newwar-towns to help the war effort. Desperate to meet the housing needsof defence workers, Washington passed the Lanham Act giving lucrativesubsidies to private developers. The leaders formed a lobby, the NationalAssociation of Home Builders (nahb), and restructured their mode ofoperations. By 1942 the private sector had built nearly a milliondwellings, 80 per cent of the wartime total. Mass production and prefab-rication facilitated fast-track schedules for barracks, trailers,demountable units and permanent housing. (The nahb insisted thishousing had to be taken off the market, either demolished or sold afterthe war ended.) Gunnison’s conveyor belts led to the firm’s slogan ‘Pressa Button, and You Get a Home’. Henry Kaiser’s Aluminum Companyused factory-based systems to create plants and housing for 45,000 ship-yard workers and their families, including the ‘miracle city’ of Vanport,Oregon, soon known as Kaiserville. William Levitt adopted labour-saving on-site techniques from southern California developers tobuild 750 naval officers’ homes at Oakdale Farms in Norfolk, Virginia,which became the prototype for Levittown in 1947, the low-cost,mass-produced housing project that epitomized post-war suburbia.51

A third of these defence workers were women – known generically asRosie the Riveter – which raised questions about the relations betweenhome and work, especially since three-quarters of them were married.

Bruce Goff, SeabeeChapel, Camp Parks,California, 1945.

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Although women with young children were encouraged to stay at home,Kaiser provided 24-hour daycare services staffed by experts, and 3,000such centres were constructed around the country.52 Pietro Belluschi’sMcLoughlin Heights in Washington state put daycare in an arcadedshopping centre around a pedestrian green, an amenity lauded in thepress as a new kind of community centre. But most defence townsadopted fha standards for ‘planned communities’ with limited socialservices. As large numbers of African-Americans migrated from theSouth seeking factory work, racial segregation became more entrenched,and ‘incursions’ led to riots in several cities. When American local gov-ernments looked ahead to a new phase of growth, most of them tookthese self-contained, segregated satellite communities as the prototypefor post-war suburbia and urban redevelopment.

Once again, some notable alternatives merit close attention. HerbertWhittemore, director of the Division of Defense Housing, hired a num-ber of prominent modern architects. Indeed, he specifically called for‘Unusual materials, designs, and methods of fabrication not used innormal times’.53 A small British pamphlet, ‘Homes by the Million’,praised the results, proof that standardization did not have to be monot-onous, that site plans were as important as architecture.54 Constructiontechnologies and site plans received far more attention than social serv-ices in all these projects. Antonin Raymond called for ‘small laboratoriesof housing with the architects as chief scientists’, such as his project atBethlehem, Pennsylvania.55 Neutra’s Channel Heights near Los Angelesarranged four different house types in a bold abstract pattern, makingan asset of the rugged terrain cut by a deep ravine. Gropius’s andBreuer’s Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, soft-ened prefab units by adding wood siding and following the contours ofdifficult terrain. William Wurster produced 1,700 demountable housesat Carquenez Heights at the Vallejo shipyards north of San Francisco ina record 73 days, half the units in plywood, the other half in Homasote.Ever the pragmatist, Wurster insisted on experimentation along withresults, convincing the government to allocate 25 units for him to tryother methods – skeleton frame, bentwood frame, masonry walls – eachof which proved less expensive than conventional modular systems.56

Inspired low-cost housing was important to Louis Kahn, who formeda partnership with George Howe in Philadelphia to complete five war-housing projects. Oskar Stonorov often joined them, and CatherineBauer’s ‘office’ occupied a corner of the collective workspace. Their mostingenious and well-publicized design was Carver Court, a 100-unittownship for African-American steelworkers near Lancaster,Pennsylvania (1944). Here Kahn first articulated what he called ‘Essential


Space’, a concept and formal expression he would sustain until his death.The initial drawings and the term ground-free alluded to Le Corbusier’spilotis, but Kahn’s scheme anticipated changes. Bold concrete formsraised the living areas off the ground plane to provide spaces that resi-dents could use for the rituals of their ordinary lives – protecting a carperhaps, or enclosing a play area or an extra room. A handsome com-munity centre was another essential, a simple yet unmistakable ‘socialmonument’ to forge collective identity.57

Wars often initiate specialized environments for destruction. TheArmy sent the émigré architects Antonin Raymond, Konrad Wachsmanand Erich Mendelsohn to Dougway, Utah, to create replicas of typicalJapanese and German villages for incendiary bomb tests. Far morepotent was the vast, once-secret world of the Manhattan EngineerDistrict (med), which oversaw atomic weapons at four locations eventu-ally known as Hanford, Washington; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos,New Mexico; and Alamagordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic-weapon bomb was tested.

Plans for Oak Ridge came first and grew most quickly, despite utmostsecrecy. The choice of a fledgling architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings &

Kahn, Howe &Stonorov, CarverCourt housing forAfrican-Americandefence workers,Coatesville,Pennsylvania, 1944,community centre(left) and housing.

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Merrill, with only 25 employees, shows the military’s strategic decision-making and the long-term implications. Louis Skidmore and NathanielOwings founded a partnership in 1936, then worked on the New YorkWorld’s Fair of 1939 with John Merrill. They affiliated with the PierceFoundation to produce a prefabricated Experimental House, whichbecame the basis for 600 new dwellings at Albert Kahn’s Glenn L. MartinAircraft Factory outside Baltimore in 1941. Plans for Oak Ridge began inJune 1942, but six months later med officials expressed frustration thatthe initial firm lacked any ‘originality or modern innovations’.58 A secretcommittee contracted the Pierce Foundation and its architects. Onlywhen hostilities ended would the world learn about the 75,000 peoplewho lived and worked in Oak Ridge, with every building designed andsupervised in secret by the 650 employees of a firm that now called itselfsom, an acronym first used in 1949.

There was nothing architecturally significant about Oak Ridge, butthe architects’ teamwork and all-encompassing organization impressedboth government and corporate leaders. As Ambrose Richardson, an

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, K-25gaseous diffusionplant for U-235 bombmaterial, Oak Ridge,Tennessee, 1944.


som architect, later explained: ‘We were no longer the starry-eyed youngdesigners who wanted to rebuild the world in the Le Corbusier, Miesmold. We did still seek that, tempered by the pragmatism born of anextraordinary, immediate need. We matured a lot.’59

Progress had been the goal for New Deal and wartime architects,defined by an amalgam of rigour and risk-taking. Roland Wank put itclearly in 1941: ‘We seek fulfillment in action.’60 As concerns shifted fromSocial Security to national security, government agencies increased thescale, cost and complexity of their endeavours across the country andthen around the world. Modern ambitions resided in the chillinglybeautiful factories, the vast house-building industry, the scientific-research organizations, the planned leisure activities. The integratednetworks of institutions and companies that made key decisions duringthe war would then commission the most significant post-war architec-ture. The media baron Henry Luce recognized this when he used hiseditorial page in Life to proclaim the war as the dawn of the ‘greatAmerican century’.61

As always, there were alternative voices in politics, intellectual life, thearts and in architecture. The most vivid came from the two coasts. Thedrawings of Charles and Ray Eames captured their enthusiasm aboutwartime knowledge. Ray’s covers for Arts & Architecture in the 1940s

115 Charles Eames,‘What Is a House?’from Arts &Architecture(July 1944).

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used vivid abstract shapes to encourage open-ended interpretations.Citing Buckminster Fuller, Charles emphasized that ‘the miracle ofindustry in war would revolutionize the peacetime world’, especially inmuch-needed new housing. The sterile parameters of functionalism hadto give way to more personal, sometimes even ephemeral concepts ofhuman ‘needs’.62 Both of the Eameses anticipated a more cohesive yetstill joyful and individualized national agenda.

The Museum of Modern Art synthesized the varied ideas and ambi-tions of the New Deal and the war years with a series of exhibitionsunder Elizabeth Mock. Also Catherine Bauer’s sister, Mock served as act-ing director of Architecture from 1941 until Philip Johnson ousted her in1945. Her popular 1944 exhibition and catalogue, Built in usa since 1932,provided a ‘creative synthesis’ of overlapping currents during thatremarkable decade. The title suggests both a sequel and an antidote tothe famous International Style exhibition of 1932. Mock’s show celebrat-ed the tva, the fsa, Dunsmuir Flats, Johnson Wax, several Usonianhouses, Taliesin West, New York’s Municipal Asphalt Plant, the CrowIsland School, Carver Court and many of the buildings discussed in thischapter. Her brief text spoke eloquently about the need for ‘humanizing’modern architecture, embracing the challenges of science and industrywithout neglecting those of environmentalism, emotions and commu-nity life. Those themes are again resonant today.63


I. M. Pei, Alcoa’sWashington PlazaApartments,Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, 1964,view from a ‘blighted’neighbourhood, fromFortune magazine(October 1964).

Americans felt justly proud when their decisive role in World War Twocatapulted the nation to superpower status. Immediate post-war realitieswere difficult, however, with the country plagued for several years bysevere inflation, housing shortages and job scarcities. The ‘gi Bill ofRights’ promised generous education, health and housing benefits for 11million returning veterans, but facilities were sorely lacking. The horrorsand deprivations of the war made a safe middle ground seem especiallyappealing. Commentators touted social and political consensus – whatArthur Schlesinger, Jr, called ‘the vital center’ in 1949 – as the basis for afundamental national character, an American Exceptionalism. Theascendancy of modern architecture became a central tenet of this accordthroughout the country and the world.

All sorts of angst underlay the ‘nifty fifties’. A cheerful outlook wasalways shadowed by the risk of failure, falling from grace by having madethe wrong choice. With the first references to the Cold War in 1948, thegovernment initiated a military and propaganda campaign of prepared-ness. Officials promised protection in underground bomb shelters andcurvilinear architectural surfaces that supposedly deflected radioactivefallout. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s virulent attacks on supposedCommunist infiltration made any criticism seem potentially dangerous.Competition between companies, cities and neighbours was all the moreintense for being discreetly hidden. The transparency of curtain wallsand picture-windows could not assuage ever-present fears about con-tamination, subterfuge, spies and secret lives.

Architecture did not escape the ferocity of these tensions. LewisMumford’s 1947 essay ‘The Bay Area’ in the New Yorker attacked theInternational Style as placeless and inhumane, then extolled an alterna-tive Modernism, a ‘free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, theclimate, and the way of life’. His title clearly referred to northernCalifornia, past and present, although Mumford resisted provincialism,lauding similar predilections from Latin America to New England. PhilipJohnson, once again moma’s Curator of Architecture, quickly counter-

c h a p t e r f i v e

The Triumph of Modernism,1946–1964

attacked, staging a 1948 symposium with an alarmist title: ‘What IsHappening to Modern Architecture?’ Even a sensitive designer likeMarcel Breuer mocked Mumford’s appeal to humanism. ‘If “human” isconsidered identical with redwood all over the place or with imperfec-tion and imprecision,’ he sneered, ‘then I am against it.’1 The vituperativetone and aftermath of this event forced the discipline into polarizedcamps, contemptuous and soon ignorant of each other: East Coast versus West, universalism versus regionalism, radical avant-garde inno-vations versus adaptive pragmatist experiments.

As if to finalize the break, a 1952 moma exhibition, Built in usa,acclaimed pristine office buildings, elegant apartment buildings andsuburban dwellings along with one glass-walled industrial structure inTexas in deference to the 1920s European Modern Movement. CuratorsArthur Drexler and Henry-Russell Hitchcock proclaimed that the ‘qual-ity and significance’ of post-war American architecture was ‘morenationally standardized – in a good sense’ and also ‘more luxurious – andnot to balk at a word – beautiful’.2 To buttress the implied comparisonthey appropriated the title from Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 show, therebyerasing its legacy of popular, multifaceted Modernisms.

Modern art was central to the post-war commercial world and tointellectual resistance against the pervasive influence of ‘mass culture’,typically attacked as a form of totalitarianism. The avant-garde sawthemselves as outsiders to an establishment that often cultivated them asit explored a wide range of aesthetics. Clement Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Gardeand Kitsch’ became a mantra, affirming the intellectual difficulty of ‘gen-uine art’ by heroic individuals whose rigorous formalism probed thedistinctive medium of their art, whether painting or architecture. ‘Theessence of Modernism,’ he told a Voice of America audience, lay ‘in theuse of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the disciplineitself.’3 Critics like Dwight McDonald condemned all aspects of ‘middle-brow’ or ‘midcult’ taste. Television soon extended the pervasive andseemingly pernicious realm of popular culture to a mass audience.Whereas only 5 per cent of households had televisions in 1950, this esca-lated to almost 90 per cent by the end of the decade. To artists andintellectuals, the built environments and social worlds on the screenseemed unspeakably vulgar.

President Harry S. Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers assuredthe nation of permanent prosperity so long as American capitalismexperienced continuous growth, regulated by fine-tuned governmentalinterventions. Government agencies helped the private sector expanddramatically, especially producers of building materials and the real-estate industry. The gross national product soared 250 per cent between

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1945 and 1960, while expenditures on new construction multiplied nine-fold. A prescient 1947 article by Hitchcock dared to suggest that ‘theArchitecture of Bureaucracy’ in large, anonymous firms might be appro-priate for most needs in post-war society. He acknowledged theusefulness of an ‘Architecture of Genius’ for monumental structures, butwarned of ‘pretentious absurdity’.4

In principle, all Americans were middle class or almost there. Theunprecedented affluence of the 1950s created the world’s first mass middleclass, roughly half the population by most indicators, with race a majorfactor in the split. Real incomes rose for most socio-economic groups, asdid home ownership, while the advent of credit cards and new consumergoods provided a bounty of comforts known as ‘the good life’. ‘Fitting in’was a prime goal, and most groups ostracized those who did not abide bytheir norms. In many ways the country was more democratic than at anytime in its history, but also more materialistic and intensely consciousabout status. C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951) described businessmenassuming the trappings of professionals, including their titles, claims ofhighly specialized knowledge, and assertions of public interest.Professionals, including architects, became even more concerned abouttheir own authority and prestige. Modern architecture was a cornerstoneof these ambitions, whether in civic facilities, office buildings or houses.Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) compared blue-collar suspicionsof Modernism with its ‘snob-appeal’ for those with aspirations. ‘Eggheadshave enough self-assurance so that they can defy convention’, he contend-ed, ‘and they often cherish the simplicity of open lay-out.’5

Businessmen and politicians saw the modern metropolis in terms oforderly development and deplored the dynamic, disorderly world of citystreets. Urban renewal – a generic term taken from 1954 federal legisla-tion – remains the most controversial aspect of post-war Americangrowth. The 1949 Housing and Urban Redevelopment Act joined federaland local governments to ‘modernize’ downtowns and boost propertyvalues by clearing blighted properties to create large parcels that wouldattract investors. As experts looked for problems they could ‘solve’, theyfixated on recent African-American migration to major cities, whichincreased dramatically during the 1940s and ’50s with the decline ofSouthern sharecropping. A major tax liability, this demographic shiftalso fuelled ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Title i of the 1949 Act gave re-development agencies two-thirds of the funds to eradicate blighted areas.Only 20 per cent of a designated area had to be declared ‘blighted’ for theentirety to be demolished.

Urban renewal dispossessed more than 400,000 families between1949 and 1967, federally aided urban highways an additional 330,000. The

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writer James Baldwin called this ‘Negro removal’, although small-scalecommerce and homes in stable white ethnic neighbourhoods also fell tothe bulldozers. Low-income African-Americans lost the equivalent ofone of every five homes. Replacement or public housing provided for lessthan one half of 1 per cent of those displaced. White ethnics scatteredfairly widely, although many experienced a sense of ‘grief ’ as they werecut off from the ties of family and friends, but racial segregation limitedoptions for African-Americans, which in turn increased rents and over-crowding. Black ghettos and all-white suburbs became far morepermanent and pervasive features of American life, what one Soul songcalled ‘a chocolate city with vanilla suburbs’, although there were someall-black suburbs.6

The results transformed American cities almost as radically as theirbombed-out counterparts in Europe and Japan. New building sought tokeep or lure wealthy residents and increase urban tax bases.Construction standards in Title i housing for middle-class tenants werenotoriously shoddy and favoured small units, making them unsuitablefor families with children. Luxury apartments and corporate office towerspredominated, along with convention centres, stadia and tourist mon-uments like the St Louis Arch (1947–66). Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center byOtto Eggert and Daniel Higgins was the nation’s first completed redevel-opment (1948–53). Mayor David Lawrence then appointed himself headof the Redevelopment Agency and continued major projects. The 1954Urban Renewal Act encouraged cities to combine historic preservationwith large-scale new building. Almost 1,600 urban-renewal projectswould be in place by 1965. Highly visible examples include Denver’s MileHigh Center (1952–60), Philadelphia’s Penn Center and Society Hill(1955–64), San Francisco’s Golden Gateway and Embarcadero Center(1957–67) and Boston’s Prudential Center and Government Center(1960–68). By 1960 Fortune magazine could proclaim a revised model ofthe American city as ‘a control tower’.7

Scientific and social-scientific discourse helped legitimate architects’desire for leadership, especially in urban transformations. mit’s NorbertWiener, author of Cybernetics (1948), extrapolated from the ‘feedback’conditions of new information-processing machines. Harvard’s WalterGropius favoured the social sciences, cellular biology and nuclearphysics. The main result was analogies about social cohesion, organicgrowth and dynamic power in architecture. The Social Science ResearchCouncil sponsored a conference in 1951 about these trends, but quicklywithdrew from the topic in frustration about the vague methods. Thisdid not curtail architects’ enthusiasm.8 References to quantitative surveysgenerated vague norms about the ‘typical office’ or ‘average family’. Facile

Elaine de Kooning inthe de Koonings’ Soho loft, New YorkCity, c. 1958.

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‘liveability’ studies evoked psychoanalytic theories and sociological datato prove the potent effects of home environments.

The familiar story of post-war Modernism gives the illusion of a com-mon purpose which has obscured significant experiments and variationsin all the arts, including the peripheries of architecture. Some were cre-ated by inspired ‘outsiders’. Simon Rodia completed Watts Towers in LosAngeles in 1954 after 33 years of inspired, ad hoc construction. Elusive‘underground’ artists transgressed boundaries, while small journalsexplored broad cultural terrains. The Walker Art Gallery in Minneapoliscreated the Everyday Art Quarterly (renamed Design Quarterly in 1951).J. B. Jackson’s Landscape explored ‘new architectural forms’ in the ‘ordinaryrealm’, including builders’ houses and drive-in restaurants. The firstsemi-programmed, mixed-media ‘happenings’ and live electronic musicwere staged; bebop dissonance spurred virtuoso riffs; and painters incor-porated tattered fragments of mass culture. New York artistsunintentionally suggested a new approach to space, beauty and timewhen they began to transform industrial lofts into live/work spaces in thelate 1950s. Faced with abandoned buildings when industries moved outof the city, landlords were willing to rent cheaply, if illegally. The artistshoned necessity into an aesthetic, transmuting the gritty open spaces ofindustrial modernity into a harbinger of future trends in design. Withina decade, these aesthetic principles would play a visible role in architec-ture, and three decades later in real estate.

Corporate Modernism

Post-war finance and business launched a ‘systems’ revolution. The econ-omist and management consultant Peter Drucker led the charge with hisinfluential book The Concept of the Corporation (1946). Transferring mili-tary strategies to private business, he hailed a rational model of centralizedmanagement and decentralized operations, each entity a holistic ‘socialinstitution’. In principle, both individuals and units would identify them-selves as interchangeable parts in a corporation’s large-scale, standardizedyet more flexible system. Financial and marketing specialists calculatedtactics for continual growth, in part through ‘planned obsolescence’ – aterm coined in 1954, although the basic principle had emerged in the 1920s.A parallel set of human-relations experts sought to build employee moraleand company loyalty. Prestigious architecture firms synthesized these goalswith new kinds of office buildings based on the subtle distinctions of a sta-tistical Sublime. Large architect-engineering-construction companiesbuilt generic modern structures with higher capacities and more ‘flexiblespace’ – converting a wartime idea to peacetime prosperity.

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Interior spaces helped reorganize the day-to-day world of advancedcapitalism after World War Two. Modern paintings and sculptureadorned the transparent ground-floor lobbies, suggesting lofty principles.Isamu Noguchi created biomorphic lobby ceilings for two of HarrisArmstrong’s 1947–8 corporate headquarters in St Louis, although mostlobbies were self-consciously understated. Noguchi and other modernsculptors soon collaborated with architects to design outdoor plazas formajor corporate clients. Art served to humanize business calculations.Office floors were much larger in the raw space of their footprints and the‘modular coordination’ of perfectly uniform arrangements. Designers


Skidmore Owings &Merrill (Natalie deBlois and GordonBunshaft, principaldesigners), UnionCarbide Building, NewYork City, 1960, typical office interior.

Pietro Belluschi,Equitable Building,Portland, Oregon,1944–8 (today theCommonwealthBuilding), main street façade.

replicated the physiognomy of the exterior building modules, subdivid-ing internal grids with lightweight standardized office partitions, visiblesigns of order and flexibility – even if changes were rare. Control extend-ed to micro-grids of luminous ceiling panels and sealed windows toensure a uniform temperature with central air conditioning. The furni-ture designer Florence Knoll collaborated with major architects toprovide evidence of good taste and orderly employee diligence for elitecorporations. A new profession called ‘space planning’ helped balancestrong public image with efficiency in ordinary offices.

Architects mostly obsessed about façades, especially the transparentcurtain wall, a thin, non-load-bearing cladding ‘hung’ on the structuralframe. The term honed Modernism’s focus on surface or skin, combin-ing visible transparency with the minimalist elegance of constructiondetails. Executives shared architects’ beliefs that impeccably coordinatedbuilding systems communicated directly to employees and the public.The building committee for the Inland Steel headquarters in Chicagospoke of investing in a ‘unique institutional identification’, or corporateimage; its chairman compared the façade to ‘a man with immaculateEnglish tailoring’.9

Two precedents were clear at the time: Mies van der Rohe’s unbuiltBerlin project for a glass skyscraper (1921–2) andPietro Belluschi’s Equitable Insurance CompanyBuilding in Portland, Oregon (1944–8). Belluschihad first conceived the latter project forArchitectural Forum’s 1943 series, ‘New Buildingsfor 194x’, so he was ready when a pre-war clientapproached him the next year for an office build-ing. Sheathed in thin war-surplus aluminium,the Equitable rose all of twelve storeys, but itsconcrete frame and aluminium spandrels werevirtually flush. Slender ground-level piers clad inpinkish marble maintained the street wall and aprotected walking corridor for pedestrians. Theabsence of parking revealed pre-war origins,but the interiors were decidedly up-to-date withopen floor plans and exacting climate controls.The immense glass windows were tinted, insulatedand sealed, washed by an ingenious system sus-pended from the roof (soon a standard devicearound the country). Initially greeted withresounding praise, the Equitable’s provinciallocation then hid it from view until a restoration

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in 1988 as the Commonwealth Building reaffirmed its significance as thefirst all-glass office tower.

Curtain walls and open, grid-based interiors became trademarks ofSkidmore Owings and Merrill (som) and New York’s Lever House(1949–52) assured their reputation for prestigious corporate state-ments. The structure comprised two gleaming asymmetrical frames:one hovers, a horizontal two-storey plane traversing the site; the otherascends 24 storeys. Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer in the New Yorkoffice, convinced the client to create magnanimous public spaces, abroad ‘plaza’ under the piloti supports and an exhibition area in thetower’s glass-enclosed lobby. A provision in the municipal zoningregulations permitted towers with small footprints to rise as sheer vol-umes without the setbacks required of 1920s skyscrapers. Bunshaft alsounderstood architectural symbolism: the transparent façades celebrat-ed cleanliness for a producer of soaps; lightly green-tinted glassreduced glare; spandrel glass between floors made the building seem tofloat unobtrusively. Its immediate success solidified the shift of NewYork’s business and finance from Lower Manhattan to Midtown thathad begun during the 1920s, while glass revolutionized a districtdefined by limestone.

som soon acquired four regional offices and high-status internationalcommissions. Each office balanced collective anonymity with talentedindividuals. Natalie de Blois was another chief designer in the New Yorkoffice, bringing an incandescent lightness to the Union Carbide andthe Pepsi-Cola buildings (both 1958–60). Walter Netsch provided theschematics for the Crown-Zellerbach Building in San Francisco (com-pleted by Chuck Basset in 1959) and then moved to Chicago. Netsch’sInland Steel (1954–8) gave prominence to gleaming steel columns risingthe full height of the façade and clearly differentiated internal functionswith a set-back windowless box for elevators, stairs and the hvac system.Fortune contended that ‘som took Mies’s stainless-steel standard,warmed it up and sold it as a prestige package to the us businessman.’10

For most architects nothing surpasses New York’s exquisite SeagramBuilding on Park Avenue, diagonally across the street from Lever House.Another narrative of redemption helped build its mythic status. SamuelBronfman, president of the corporation, an international whisky-distribution company, announced a grand new building to celebrateits centennial in 1954 and selected an architect. His daughter, PhyllisLambert, convinced him of the need for higher aspirations. Mies van derRohe seemed the pivotal figure who was creating a ‘grammar’ and a‘poetry’ for modern architecture. ‘You might think this austere strength,this ugly beauty, is terribly severe’, Lambert explained.‘It is, and yet all the


more beauty in it.’11 Assertive individual interventions seem a leitmotif inAmerican corporate Modernism.

Completed in 1958, the Seagram Building reduced modern architec-tural form to its simplest, most perfect elements. Clad in sumptuoustravertine and topaz-tinted glass, this sleek box redefined the slab. Adouble-height glass entry lightened the massive structure. A grid ofbronze i-beams is welded to the curtain wall at close intervals to evokethe ideal of structural expression. As with Lever House, the public spacetransmuted zoning regulations to permit a perfect rectangular volumeand extended a grand gesture of noblesse oblige. The granite-paved plazaoccupies 48 per cent of the site, raised on a plinth, if only two steps offthe sidewalk. This grand forecourt distances the 38-storey tower from thestreet. The interiors are finished with exacting attention and opulentmaterials. Every aspect of the building is faultless and therefore neutral,leading to frequent comparisons with a Greek temple. Lewis Mumfordconsidered the Seagram Building the ‘Rolls Royce’ of contemporarybuildings, while Manfredo Tafuri spoke of its ‘aloof ’ character, ‘tragically. . . self-aware’ of its superiority.12

The quality of Mies’s building encouraged architects to believe thatsingular artworks allowed them to operate within a commercializedworld, uncontaminated by commercial influences. Critical analysisfocused on nuances of intellectual and formal rigour. Colin Rowe’s 1956essay, ‘Chicago Frame’, sought to distinguish unique works of art by mas-ter architects from the standardized veneers of buildings by commercialarchitects. Yet the inevitability of inexpensive copies raised a criticaldilemma, given modern architecture’s inherent drive towards replica-tion. Every society confronts differences in economic leverage andtechnical skills. Rather than simply deploring inevitable copying, howcan modern architects help improve urban streetscapes?

Many companies moved their headquarters to suburban locationswhere inexpensive land facilitated rambling low-rise facilities and easyexpansion. Most industrial or business parks of the 1950s were haphazardgroupings of bland structures with insipid landscapes, but some corpo-rate ‘campuses’ were impeccably elegant. The General Motors TechnicalCenter outside Detroit, commissioned in 1945, set a high standard even asit drew on the audacity of popular culture. Having overtaken Ford as theindustry leader, gm’s chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr, took up Drucker’s cor-porate programme of centralized policy-making and decentralizedoperations. Recognizing the pent-up demand for exciting new automo-biles, he added vibrant stylistic imagery to the package, appointing gm’schief stylist, Harley J. Earl, as the first Vice-President of Design of any cor-poration. Earl initiated a series of remarkable changes, not just tail fins


Mies van der Rohe andPhilip Johnson,Seagram Building, NewYork City, 1954–8.

and two-tone paint, but the annual model change, which he called‘dynamic obsolescence’: the creation of desire for the latest styling.

Although Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s design for the gm Center began asa joint project, Eero took over after his father’s death in 1950. His appear-ance on a 1952 Time cover celebrated the Center’s rigorous engineering,especially the early curtain-wall sections and the 1.5-metre modular sys-tem. Thomas Church’s landscape design accentuated the orderedhorizontality of the composition, offset by a tall, elliptical water towerand a sleek, low dome for Earl’s exhibition extravaganzas. Buildingmock-ups allowed for systematic development, replacing the hagio-graphic ideal of aloof genius with models of collaboration and feedback.Eleven vibrant colours of glazed ceramic-brick walls distinguishedvarious research functions, carried through to details, furnishings, eventhe colour of push-pins inside each building. Eero soon delved intoAmerican car culture with Neoprene gaskets and sleek glass, all speciallyproduced by gm. He paid homage to Earl’s famous spokes and tail finsin the main public lobby. Some custodians of high culture sneered atSaarinen’s ‘immoral’ styling as an assault on the dignity of ‘true’Modernism. He seemed too comfortable with big businessmen, hisdesigns too appealing to the popular press. When the gm complexopened in 1956, Life called it a ‘Versailles of Industry’.13

Office buildings were often staid glass boxes, but sometimes startling.Suppliers encouraged adventurous applications to promote their

Eliel and EeroSaarinen, GeneralMotors TechnicalCenter, Warren,Michigan, 1945–56,view to exhibitiondome, from GM

brochure WhereToday MeetsTomorrow.

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General MotorsTechnical Center,lobby.


products: Harrison & Abramowitz glorified one material at the CorningGlass Center in New York in 1951, another in the Alcoa AluminumCompany offices in Davenport, Iowa, and in the clip-on diamond-faceted panels of the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters in 1953. A courtruling that aluminium, the first man-made metal, had to allow competi-tion prompted the rival companies to commission audacious newcorporate structures and scores of other uses from parking garages tohousing. One of the most surprising is surely Minoru Yamasaki’s ‘archi-tecture of delight’ with gold-anodized aluminium screens on theReynolds Metals Regional Office in Detroit in 1961.

Exuberant vivacity was more common outside the East Coast. Evenbanks, usually quite sedate, invested in eye-catching architecture. ThreeOklahoma City banks are still surprising. The eponymous Gold Dome(1958), the undulating concrete shells of the drive-through facilities atCentral National Bank (1960), and the State Capitol Bank (1963), knownlocally as the ‘flying saucer bank’ and often featured in the nationalmedia, were all designed by the hometown firm of Roloff, Bailey, Bozalis,Dickinson. Enrique Gutierrez’s Bacardi usa (1963) in Miami translatedMies’s Seagram Building into a Latin idiom, decorating two walls withresplendent murals in glazed-ceramic tiles from Spain. Commercialarchitecture in Miami seemed to dance as the strong relief on its façades(today known as Mi-Mo) accentuated colour, texture, shadows and othersensual delights.

The physics historian Peter Galison has highlighted the emergence of‘Big Science’, typically dispersed away from major cities, during the post-war era. Post-war federal agencies funded scientific research and facilitiesin every field from atomic energy to zoology. The National ScienceFoundation, created in 1950, would see its influence soar after the Russianslaunched Sputnik in 1957. Large generic buildings proliferated for majorchemical companies, pharmaceuticals, the energy industry and aeronau-tics during the Cold War. Galison links these spatial practices with modernart and architecture, as well as with the emergence of the ‘military-indus-trial complex’, a term first used in President (former General) DwightEisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech to the nation.14 Modern architecture wasclosely linked to defence contracts as well as to corporate power.

SiliconValley emerged in the farmland between San Francisco andSan José just after World War Two. Stanford University Vice-PresidentFred Terman established the Stanford Industrial Park in 1946 to encour-age industry collaboration in high-tech research. Hewlett-Packardjoined immediately since Terman had helped his former graduate stu-dents Hewlett and Packard set up a workspace in a Palo Alto garage in1938 – now revered as a national landmark. The site was soon given amore stately name: Stanford Research Center. The landscape architectThomas Church designed the 265-hectare site plan, while Terman him-self established regulations about informal low-rise buildings and helpedchoose architects. Some were major figures, notably Erich Mendelsohn,who designed the headquarters for Varian Associates, and JohnWarnecke, who designed General Electric’s microwave division. Asimilar, if less cohesive approach, took hold elsewhere, most conspic-uously along Route 128 outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Roloff, Bailey,Bozalis, Dickinson,State Capitol Bank,Oklahoma City,Oklahoma, 1963.

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The embryonic information-technology industry sometimes spon-sored notable modern architecture. O’Neil Ford, the architect of theTexas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Richardson, Texas(1956–8), invited the Mexican architect-engineer Felix Candela to collab-orate on the hyperbolic paraboloid shapes supported by pre-castconcrete tetrapods. Recognizing that this emerging industry requiredcontinuous technology upgrades, Ford created the first full interstitialfloor between working floors. To encourage employees’ collaboration, heaccentuated landscaped areas and hand-crafted wooden screens inabstract patterns, both integral to his Modernism.

Meanwhile ibm’s Thomas Watson, Jr, began a complete makeovergeared to computers in 1952. Watson hired Eliot Noyes to oversee the sleek‘new look’ that encompassed product design, flexible ‘horizontal’ manage-ment and architecture: 150 plants, laboratories and office buildingsthroughout the world in the succeeding fifteen years.15 Noyes gave EeroSaarinen several important commissions, notably the Watson ResearchCenter (1957–61) in Yorktown Heights, New York, an enormous arc – 300metres long, 45 metres wide and three storeys high – with sleek glass prom-enades on the front and rear, echoed by interior corridors. Saarinen kept thesight lines under 30 metres to avoid vertigo. Saarinen also designed aresearch structure for Bell Laboratories (1957–62) in Holmdel, New Jersey,using dark mirrored glass to reduce heat gain, ensure security and provideanother signature façade. Such distinctive architecture has now set preser-vationists against the companies as they seek to replace their outdatedresearch buildings.

Healthcare followed a similar pattern. The National Institute of Healthsponsored multi-purpose hospitals for veterans while an emergent corpo-rate medicine combined federal research funds with private-sector profits.

O’Neil Ford, TexasInstrumentsSemiconductorBuilding, Richardson,Texas, 1956–8, con-struction photograph.


The Texas Medical Center in Houston became world-famous when its 1947campus added nine specialized hospitals in the succeeding six years, alongwith adjacent education and medical-office buildings. The centrepiece, theM. D. Anderson Cancer Center (1951–4) by MacKie & Kamrath, set newstandards for oncological surgery, treatment, research and teaching. In thewords of Architectural Forum, the building synthesized ‘a complex indus-trial plant’ with Wrightian ‘organic architecture’.16 The multi-levelintegration of landscapes added visual richness and therapeutic calm.

If Houston provided the model for recombinant expansion, LouisKahn created two architectural monuments for medical research withtwo laboratory settings. The Richards Medical Research Building

Salk Institute, sectionshowing Vierendeeltrusses.

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Louis I. Kahn, SalkInstitute for BiologicalStudies, La Jolla,California, 1959–65,view of studies andcourtyard.

(1957–61) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia replacedimpersonal corridors with clusters of small labs in three eight-storeytowers. Kahn’s humanistic systems analysis differentiated ‘served’ spacesfor human work from ‘servant’ spaces for mechanical equipment, rele-gated to a fourth tower, although some scientists complained thatsymbolism trumped functionalism. Kahn’s Salk Institute for BiologicalStudies (1959–65) in La Jolla, California, took these ideas about order toa transcendent plane. A thin channel of water slices the spare centralcourt, leading towards the Pacific and seemingly towards infinity. Tworows of four-storey concrete towers, open at ground level and angled forviews of the sea, contain private studies and collective labs. Full intersti-tial service floors of pre-stressed Vierendeel trusses afford seismicsupport. Cloistered bridges, staircases and courtyards link the work-places with chalkboards set into the walls at the junctures to encourageimpromptu exchanges. Unpainted teak panels have weathered to softantique patinas. Kahn’s attention to minute details evoked scientific pre-cision. The fundamentals of biological research and architecturalsystems entered the realm of the Sublime.

‘Good-life’ Modernism

‘Like them or not,’ announced Time in 1949, ‘modern houses are here tostay [with] practicality and sometimes spectacular good looks.’17 Newhouses for all classes came fully equipped with status, individuality, high-tech amenities and the natural Sublime. It took some time, however. Fiveyears after the armistice the Housing Act of 1949 finally generated a long-awaited surge. An astounding 2 million dwelling units went up in 1950,and a total of more than 13 million between 1950 and 1960 – 11 million ofthem in the suburbs, which grew six times faster than cities. The elusivepromise of security in the suburbs drove private emotions and publicpolicy. Washington endorsed suburban decentralization as protectionagainst a Russian nuclear attack. Indirect federal subsidies includedincome-tax benefits and expanded mortgage programmes, each costingthe government at least five times more than it spent on housing subsi-dies for the poor.

A formidable cultural apparatus promoted modern suburban houses.Art museums in New York, San Francisco and Minneapolis sponsoredfull-scale model homes for general audiences, as did popular magazinesand television programmes. The houses varied, of course, given thenational desire for individual expression, but Modernism triumphed,especially in systems of production and spatial organization. Structuralcomponents were highly visible. Wartime synthetics like acrylic sky-


lights, durable laminates, sandwich panels and new kinds of plywoodbecame standard. Advanced technologies for comfort included insula-tion (rare before World War Two), automatic heating, passive solarorientation – and then a rush to air conditioning in the early 1950s. Built-in facilities and storage walls provided for a conspicuous increase inconsumer goods.

The flow of space emphasized ‘zones’ rather than rooms, in part tocope with reductions in size. A ‘master bedroom’ was separated fromchildren’s bedrooms, and two new spaces appeared, an outlyingutility/laundry room and the ‘family room’ at the centre. First awkwardlycalled a ‘don’t-say-no’ place for children and teenagers, it linked the openkitchen and outdoor patio. The architect-authors of Tomorrow’s Houseand the editors of Parents’ Magazine christened the newborn spacealmost simultaneously in 1946–7. Architecture magazines lavished atten-tion on open living areas and attention-getting roofs, includingalternatives to the flat roof, much-maligned for its orthodoxy and its ten-dency to leak, but gave little attention to site.18 Shelter magazines likeHouse Beautiful defined ‘the American Style idea’ in similar terms:honest use of simple materials, comfort not show, privacy and view,

Jones & Emmons forEichler Homes, familyroom in a modelhouse in Sunnyvale,California, 1955. FirstAward of Honor fromthe AIA and theNational Associationof Home Builders.

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indoors and outdoors ‘perfectly integrated’. These articles also stressedmore overtly political references to ‘freedom of choice’ and the ‘drive forsomething better’.19

Two well-known modernists became popular heroes at this time.House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon lauded Frank Lloyd Wright’s‘greater principles’ as emblematic of American values. House and Home’sarticle ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and 1,000,000 Homes a Year’ (1953) explainedhow speculative builders could adapt specific techniques to make smallhouses seem more commodious. Richard Neutra was equally wellreceived, the evangelist of therapeutic houses that increased psychologi-cal and physiological well-being. A Time cover story from 1949 praisedhis ability to merge spaciousness with compactness, exemplified in themagnificent Kaufmann House in Palm Springs shown behind him in thecover photo. Time praised Neutra as a leader in the movement to ‘humanize and domesticate’ the International Style.20 Each of hisdomestic landscapes was highly specific; the house plans stretched outlithely, often dematerializing into their surroundings, especially where

Richard Neutra,Kaufmann House,Palm Springs,California, 1946–7.


sliding glass doors opened onto heated terraces. Neutra explored gestaltpsychology to affect illusions of infinite space. He also worked diligentlyon possible mass prototypes, seeking to convert consumerism into pro-gressive environmental design – indeed into Survival through Design, thetitle of his well-received 1954 book.

Arts & Architecture’s Case Study Program helped popularize modernhouses for a limited audience. The editor John Entenza issued a call forinnovation in January 1945, then marketed 36 model dwellings over thenext eighteen years, hoping to stimulate cooperation with industries(notably in metals) and to influence speculative housing. House #8(1945–9) by Charles and Ray Eames was an epiphany for architectsaround the world. The Eames House literally captured the post-warsense of open possibilities since it transformed an initial neo-Miesianscheme, its foundation already poured, into a serendipitous assemblagewith off-the-shelf industrial components set in an exposed steel frame.Structural rigour joined with a joyful interplay of colour and light, seem-ingly impromptu yet carefully staged. The overlapping social spacesextended into small niches with designated bedroom and studio areas,providing a flexible live/work environment for this husband-and-wifeteam, a distinct contrast to the exaggerated gender roles that definedmost houses. Yet even this remarkable prototype remained a one-off.21

Suburban mass housing went modern for many reasons, includingscale. Whereas a typical builder might have put up five houses a yearbefore the war, speculative builders now generated instant subdivisionswith thousands of tract houses, mostly indistinguishable from oneanother, which soon accounted for 80 per cent of American produc-tion.22 The phenomenon of mass builders cannot be isolated frommodernist dreams of standardized mass production. Architecture maga-zines assured readers that Modernism could happily coexist withmerchant builders and the American mass market. For several years theypromoted collaborations, offering useful design advice and pleading foralternatives to what was already recognized as sprawl.23

Most builders simply bulldozed greenfield sites to make the terrainuniform, then mixed conventional post-and-beam construction withfactory production to cut costs. Levitt & Sons converted a potato field inLong Island, New York, into the first Levittown between 1947 and 1951. By1950 the company’s offsite factory was producing one four-room houseevery sixteen minutes. Like gm, Levitt produced a new model every yearwith special ‘built-in’ features that quickly became commonplace forother builders. Behind the traditional façades were modern amenities:radiant-heated concrete slabs replaced basements; double-glazed slidingwindows and doors that extended onto patios; three-way fireplaces that


Charles and RayEames, Eames House(Case Study House #8),Pacific Palisades,California, 1945–9.

provided a centrifugal focus for open plans – a device borrowed fromFrank Lloyd Wright. Modernism endorsed standardization, whichextended to homogeneity of class, race and religion as suburbs grewincreasingly segmented.24

Modern architects had a significant effect on some impressive, raciallyintegrated white-collar developments. In 1948 the developer RobertDavenport hired Charles Goodman to craft an idyllic progressive suburboutside Washington, dc. By 1952 Hollin Hills had almost 500 homes,variations on Goodman’s fourteen different models. The landscapearchitect Dan Kiley maintained the existing topography, kept most of thetrees and avoided visible references to property lines. The aia consideredit exemplary American design. The architecture critic Michael Sorkin,who grew up in Hollin Hills, remembers it as ‘one of the truly happyexperiments in modernity’.25

Joseph Eichler built some 12,000 California houses between 1949 and1968, all resolutely modern, economical and still appealing. Anshen &Allen designed early prototypes for subdivisions in the Bay Area. In 1951Eichler turned to Quincy Jones, an innovative young architect in LosAngeles, after both received Architectural Forum awards. Expanding intothe southern California market, Eichler commissioned prototypes fromJones & Emmons, Raphael Soriano and Pietro Belluschi. Jones andEichler designed a Case Study neighbourhood project of 200 small eco-

Charles Goodman forRobert Davenport,Hollin Hills, Virginia,suburb ofWashington, DC, land-scape design byDaniel Kiley, 1948,from the AIA’s1857–1957: OneHundred Years ofArchitecture inAmerica (1957).

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logical houses in 1961, never built because of opposition to fees for thecommunity services.

Several architects challenged normative models by insisting on purity,occasionally to the point of didactic all-glass houses. Mies’s house for DrEdith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois (1945–51), exposed yet sealed off fromthe outside world, proved so expensive and frustrating that the clientsued the architect unsuccessfully. Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass Housecopied Mies’s with ‘a form of exhibitionism’ that launched his owncareer. It also helped breed some 80 flat-roofed ‘Harvard boxes’ near thestaid town of New Canaan, Connecticut.26

Regional Modernism flourished from Oregon to Florida, engenderingsofter variants on the glass box. Igor Polivitzky’s Bird-Cage House inMiami (1949) encased a glass-and-steel-frame dwelling in plastic screens,providing almost total integration with the environment. The Sarasotawunderkind Paul Rudolph took a slightly different path. His glass housesused wooden jalousies drawn from Southern vernacular traditions thatallowed residents to change the walls in line with their personal responsesto climate and desires for privacy. The thin inverted-catenary roof of his1950 Healy Guest House, known as the ‘Cocoon House’, was stabilized likea tent with cables and steel straps, then sprayed with a thin coat of Saran-vinyl ‘cocoon’ invented to protect battleships. The peripatetic HarwellHamilton Harris, Dean at the University of Texas in the 1950s, distin-guished the parochial, backward-looking ‘Regionalism of Restriction’


Paul Rudolph, HealyGuest House (‘CocoonHouse’), Sarasota,Florida, 1950.

from this ‘Regionalism of Liberation’ orlocally based experiments that explored‘emerging ideas’.27

Government agencies enthusiasticallysupported another kind of experiment,prefabrication, seeking technological solu-tions for problems of affordability. Manysuch companies collapsed, Lustron mostnotoriously, beset by financial irregulari-ties, restrictive local building codes andexaggerated promises, but some 300 firmswere producing factory-built houses by1956, accounting for 10 per cent of thenation’s total output. Innovations requiredtesting and small-scale production, sothoughtful designs by Edward Barnes,Henry Dreyfus and Charles Goodmanreached only a small market, as did CarlKoch’s series of inventions that began withfolding stressed-skin panels on the AcornHouse (1948). Koch later reflected thatarchitects find it difficult to consider siteplans, ongoing adaptations and marketing,

preferring ‘to focus on completely new prototypes’.28

The country saw many variations on basic types. Houston, Texas,enjoyed a decade of flat-roofed, steel-framed Miesian courtyard housesof all sizes and price tags. Good Housekeeping chose a design by Lars Bangas one of ten ‘Outstanding Small Houses of the Year’ in 1954. EstherMcCoy noted that ‘architectural misfits tripled during the 1950s’, espe-cially in the West, encouraging an engagement more experiential thancerebral.29 Iconoclasts experimented with biomorphic forms and unusu-al materials. Bruce Goff favoured plastics and corrugated metal. JohnLautner shaped concrete and added surprises like 750 drinking glasses setas skylights in the coffered concrete ceiling of the Sheats-GoldsteinHouse in Los Angeles (1963). Several Lautner houses have starred inblockbuster movies, iconic expressions of audacity and divergence fromconventional norms, akin to the Playboy Bachelor Pad of the era.30

Multi-family housing was fairly restrained in comparison with theexperimentation of pre-war examples. Insurance companies and hospitalsused redevelopment funds to finance huge urban enclaves, some fortu-nately relieved by thoughtful landscaping. Mies again provided the idealmodel with two luxury towers at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago

Lars Bang, BenditHouse, Houston,Texas, 1954, fromGood Housekeeping(1954).

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(1949–51), so inexorably uniform thatthey make no accommodations to sunor wind conditions. moma praised theimmaculate pair as ‘Metropolisdefined’, precisely because these ‘for-midable urban objects’ provoked anemotional response to urban life ‘sowell described by Franz Kafka’.31 Theyoung Herbert Greenwald developed

the project, recognizing Mies’s towering talent and the need to keep it incheck by providing conventional rooms rather than completely openspaces for the apartments. A decade later, Bertrand Goldberg’s cylindri-cal towers at Marina City (1959–64), also in Chicago, offered a moreflamboyant prototype and a mixed-use programme.

Low-rise garden apartments re-emerged in the mid-1950s. HerbertGreenwald decided to acquire Gratiot, a large urban-renewal site inDetroit that had laid dormant since the initial clearance in 1950. The iitfaculty began the first section, called Lafayette Park, planned by LudwigHilberseimer with a relatively informal landscape by Alfred Caldwell andan extraordinary collection of Mies’s architecture, including two-storeytownhouses, single-storey courtyard houses and three high-rise apart-ment towers. Unfortunately, Greenwald died in 1959, leaving the eightother parcels uncompleted; they were sold off separately. As at otherrenewal sites, former residents could not afford the new accommoda-tions, but the project was racially integrated and may embody a raresuccess, both spatially and socially.

Charles Goodman collaborated with the Reynolds Metal Companyon River Park Mutual Homes (1959–62), which stand out amid the largelyfailed renewal area of south-west Washington, dc. Two nine-storeyapartment buildings and barrel-roofed townhouses share commonspaces. Both showcased aluminium with patterned screens that castlyrical shadows. Similar qualities pervade the wooden geometries of StFrancis Square, a San Francisco union cooperative by Marquis & Stoller,completed in 1961. This unusual super-block combined four city blocksinto housing and a school. The 299 apartments are stacked three storeyshigh, arranged as seven groups around three major open spaces. Thelimited budget forced restraint, so the hilly site provides variety, accen-tuated by the interplay of decks, balconies and pathways. LawrenceHalprin’s landscape plan accentuated vistas, pedestrian connectionsand various areas for sitting or children’s play, relegating parking to theperiphery. This remains one of the country’s finest examples of afford-able housing.

John Lautner, Sheats-Goldstein House, LosAngeles, 1963, asshown in the movieCharlie’s Angels: FullThrottle (2003).


Mies van der Rohe,860–880 Lake ShoreDrive, Chicago,1949–51.

860–880 Lake ShoreDrive, site plan andinitial floor plan.

‘Mid-Century Modernism’ housing now commands attention in lavisharchitecture books, popular magazines and specialized real-estate firms.Even the moderate-cost, small-scale urban housing of the post-war yearsis again finding favour, especially when informal compositions are mergedwith environmentally conscious site-planning. Smaller garden-apartmentcomplexes in Miami, Chicago, and San Diego merit reconsideration. Sodo the two-storey stucco apartment buildings of Los Angeles – dubbed‘dingbats’ by Reyner Banham in reference to the prevalence of starburstornamentation that resembled the asterisk-like printing symbol.32 JamesMarston Fitch remarked that ‘one of the most curious problems facing thearchitectural editor of a national magazine is trying to keep good WestCoast dwellings from monopolizing its pages’.33

Public housing represents a small but controversial aspect of 1950sModernism. Most officials and architects embraced the high-risesuper-block as economical, even beneficial, convinced that it protectedresidents from ‘contamination’ by the surrounding slums. The costs ofthe Korean War compounded with Congressional antagonism againstservices for the poor to slash funding and obliterate many good inten-tions. Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis (1950–54) is a case in point. Both critics andthe architect, Minoru Yamasaki, ignored the fact that the original planshad been scuttled. The descent from ideals to actualities shocked reform-ers like Elizabeth Wood, then Director of the Chicago Housing Authority(cha). In 1945 she called for planning to be ‘bold and comprehensive –or it is useless and wasted’.34 The next decade revealed how concentratedlocations aggravated problems of racial segregation. When Wood tried to


Mies van der Rohe,Lafayette Park,Detroit, Michigan,1955–8.

integrate and disperse Chicago’s housing, she was immediately dis-missed. She went on to write Housing Design: A Social Theory (1961), athoughtful argument for better alternatives and more resident involve-ment. Meanwhile, cha’s Robert Taylor Houses by Shaw Metz &Associates (1960–63) packed 27,000 residents into 28 virtually identical16-storey towers on a 3.2-kilometre-long super-block – the largest suchproject in the world, now mostly demolished for a mixed-income hopevi enclave that depletes much needed housing for the poor.

The 1950s also saw a rise in second homes at ski and beach resorts,including modern icons like Neutra’s Kaufmann House and Rudolph’sCocoon House. Wartime values of mobility, restraint and climatic adap-tation remained strong for a decade with informal open plans andplayful shapes, mostly in wood. ‘Vacation houses’ could be small andflimsy, thereby legitimizing poor construction standards, especially inMiami and other fast-growing southern cities. Government propagandainsisted that all American workers enjoyed holiday homes like the onedisplayed at the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow, designed byAndrew Geller for the All-State Development Corporation. Madefamous as the site of the famous Kitchen Debate between RichardNixon and Nikita Khrushchev, it quickly became a prototype for severalhundred ‘Leisurama Homes’ sold through the department store Macy’s.Although Geller’s custom-designed beach houses remained economicaland whimsically adventurous, the country’s 3 million second homes

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Charles Goodman,River Park MutualHomes, Washington,DC, 1959–62, nightview.

Marquis & Stoller, St Francis Square,San Francisco,California, 1960–61,view of housing fromcourtyard.

St Francis Square,site plan.

would gradually become more elaborate and expensive in the early1960s.35

Spaces for Leisure and Learning

The problem of monuments preoccupied post-war architects and critics,who wondered how to represent unity in contemporary democratic soci-eties. Neo-classicism virtually disappeared in civic buildings as privatearchitects replaced bureaucratic designers. The first great example wasthe United Nations. Nelson Rockefeller donated a prime parcel of land,determined to make Manhattan the world capital for trade and diplomacy.A stellar team of international architects was assembled to create the‘Workshop of Peace’ under the leadership of the Rockefeller favouriteWallace Harrison.36 The contentious design process began in 1948; by1954 it was complete: a horizontal Assembly Building with a curved roofline (and a dome as well, to entice a loan from Congress) alongside a tallcurtain-wall slab for the Secretariat.

Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic (great-circle) domes were non-specificsolutions to any building task, based on a universal, tetrahedral cosmosof tensegrity mathematics. Fuller both criticized and exemplifiedAmericans’ romance with techno-science. Each invention was a simula-tion of natural and social systems, a means for ongoing exploration,

Hellmuth, Yamasakiand Leinweber, Pruitt-Igoe public housing,St Louis, Missouri,1950–55, photo-graphed in 1955.

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although both he and his disciples tended to take them as higher truths.The lightweight demountable dome was omnipresent for almost twodecades. The Marines deployed them in the early 1950s. The UnitedStates Information Agency (usia) took a portable dome to internationaltrade fairs and exhibitions, eager to tout American ingenuity and tech-nological prowess around the world. Fuller built a giant aluminiumdome for the Ford Motor Company headquarters in Dearborn,Michigan, and others for a railway company in Shreveport, Louisiana, forMiami’s Seaquarium and for the Climatron at St Louis’s BotanicalGarden. Architecture students around the country constructed domesoutside their schools, confident of a spiritual and technological revolu-tion. Over 300,000 geodesic domes based on Fuller’s patents were erectedbetween 1954 and his death in 1983.37

Embassies, military installations and other international buildingswere equally significant representations of democracy and free enter-prise. The State Department’s Foreign Buildings Office oversaw morethan 200 projects in 72 countries, determined to enhance America’sprestige and underscore its technological prowess. Most of the struc-tures were emphatically modern. som designed several incarnations ofan Amerika Haus in Germany, all variations on the rectangular glasshouses intended to ‘sell America’.38 The best known embassies weremodern too, notably those in New Delhi by Edward Durell Stone (1959);


Andrew Geller, ElkinHouse, Amagansett,New York, 1966,calendar from SecondHomes magazine.

R. Buckminster Fuller,portable US TradePavilion, Kabul,Afghanistan, 1956.

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in Baghdad by Josep Lluís Sert (1961); and in Athens by Gropius/tac(1962).

Flashy modern buildings for leisure were a conspicuous sign ofAmerican well-being in the post-war era. As flashy automobiles keptpeople on the move, Douglas Haskell acclaimed what he called ‘GoogieArchitecture’ in a 1952 article, taking the name from John Lautner’s bril-liant collision of fragmented planes on a 1949 Los Angeles coffee shop.39

Commercial architects of the post-war era delighted in mixing syntheticmaterials, bright colours and startling shapes, often derived from engi-neering advances like ‘cheese-holes’ in steel-webs, rippled or folded-plateroofs, concrete-shell vaults, and exaggerated diagonal or free-form(‘woggle’) supports. The razzmatazz had a broad popular appeal thatsoon extended to franchises like McDonald’s parabolic Golden Arches,designed in 1952 by Stanley Meston. In contrast, most post-war modernartists and intellectuals deplored the honky-tonk quality of the strip,resort hotels and middle-brow buildings like coffee shops or bowlingalleys. Lautner insisted that the connection with ‘Googie’ hurt his careeras a serious architect. As with Team X in Europe, the ideal vernacular wasfar away and exotic, not the commercial world close at hand.

Car-oriented suburban developers invented the regional shoppingcentre just after World War Two. Seattle’s Northgate by John Grahamset the basic formula in the years 1947–50: a freeway-intersection loca-tion, underground tunnels for deliveries, ample parking and fixed

Douglas Honnold,Biff’s Coffee Shop,Panorama City, SanFernando Valley,California, 1950.

layouts, albeit increasing in size. Suburban shoppers found a semblanceof community life – privately owned with every detail calibrated toencourage consumerism as the emblem of American happiness. VictorGruen’s Southdale (1954) outside Minneapolis introduced the first‘mall’: fully enclosed, climate-controlled, landscaped, evokingEuropean gallerias in a lively, two-level central court. ‘Integrated plan-ning’ considered everything from financing to human scale and visualsurprises. Gruen soon appropriated these elements for pedestrianmalls – he called them ‘community leisure centers’ – seeking to revital-ize main streets in small cities. But larger shopping centres grewrapidly and, like housing, increasingly segmented to draw differentsocio-economic classes.40

More Americans could afford vacations at exotic resort hotels repre-senting the ‘tropical Modernism’ of sensuous Caribbean retreats designedby Toro & Ferrer, Edward Durell Stone and Igor Polivitzky. Miami Beachhad an astounding concentration of these, notably Morris Lapidus’s eight


‘flabbergast’ hotels, as he rightly called them, drawing on his previousexperience in theatre and retail plus a few tricks from Baroque Rome. Hewas sincerely convinced that ‘the new sensualism’ fulfilled fundamental‘emotional cravings’.41 The word ‘motel’ (from motor and hotel) enteredAmerican dictionaries and lives after World War Two. Some were glam-orous, even voluptuous, like Paul Lundy’s Warm Mineral Springs Motel inVenice, Florida (1958) and Paul Williams’s La Concha in Las Vegas (1962).

Las Vegas hit the limelight in 1946 with the Flamingo, its first mod-ern (as opposed to cowboy-themed) hotel-casino. Spectacularcompetitors soon lined the Strip, most designed by car-oriented archi-tects from Los Angeles, notably Wayne McAllister, Welton Beckett andDouglas Honnold. A major shift occurred in 1957 with the emergence

Victor GruenAssociates,Southdale Mall,Edina, Minnesota,1954.

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of Young Electric Sign Company (yesco). This specialist extraordi-naire in neon and flashing lights designed signs for the 1957 MintCasino and 1958 Stardust Hotel, the latter billed as the largest hotel inthe world with 1,000 rooms. This changed basic relationships alongthe fabled Strip, where brilliant signs now upstaged the cheap andbasic architecture.

A Boeing 707 carried Pan-Am’s first non-stop flight to Europe in 1958,inaugurating ‘jet-age’ culture. Airports needed much larger runways andenticing modern structures for the surge in travel. Minoru Yamasaki’sLambert-St Louis Airport Terminal (1956) had already suggested a newidiom with its soaring, thin-shell groin vaults. The New York PortAuthority then proposed the novel idea of separate structures for eachairline, seemingly more efficient and a sight-seeing attraction as well.The original ‘Seven Wonders’ at New York’s Idlewild (now Kennedy)Airport were glorious; the most spectacular was Eero Saarinen’s twaterminal, which opened in 1962. Saarinen’s ‘form-world’ entailed a totalenvironment. This one extended from the beak-like canopy entranceand upward-soaring wings to voluptuous interiors, even to details likestair railings and heating ducts. Douglas Haskell fondly called the struc-ture ‘Eero’s “big bird” in concrete’. Within a few years severalmass-market magazines were noting the build-up of auxiliary buildings,the ‘Airport City’ as a hub for travelling businessmen who became ‘cor-porate gypsies’.42 No longer adequate by the 1990s, even the famoustwa Terminal was threatened with demolition. A preservation move-ment has convinced Jet Blue to use it for some flights, thus lendingcachet to budget travel.

New cultural institutions re-energized the experience of public space.Museums embraced contemporaryart and architecture for new build-ings and extensions to CityBeautiful temples of the early twen-tieth century. Louis Kahn’s 1953addition to the Yale Art Gallery inNew Haven, Connecticut, was hisfirst significant building, an opengrid around a massive round stair-well with an exposed space-frame ofconcrete tetrahedrons to maximizeflexibility for installations. Thebravura of other structures generat-ed early conflicts about the ‘edificecomplex’.43 Frank Lloyd Wright’s

Morris Lapidus,Americana Hotel, BalHarbor, Florida, 1957,drawing of entrance.


Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was immediately con-troversial, especially the spiralling ramp and the ‘great-room’ lobby,which he likened to being inside a seashell. Wright began the first designin 1943, modified the concept in 1952 with a change in client and patron,then completed the museum in 1959. Originally intended solely for ‘non-objective’, or abstract, painting, the curved walls of the galleries weremeant to ‘liberate’ each picture, allowing it be seen independently and inthe changing conditions of natural light. Critics, including many artists,reviled the building’s ‘egomaniacal’ upstaging of artwork. But the publicloved the dramatic spatial experience from the day it opened.

As high culture became more democratic, it often lost the vivaciousexuberance of nineteenth-century theatres that had connected actorsand audiences. Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (1959–63) was an excep-tion. Ralph Rapson, the architect, kept the interior spaces animated yetintimate with irregular acoustical ‘clouds’ and a moveable stage closelysurrounded by small asymmetrical seating areas. The dynamic façadewith its cut-out screens heightened changing perceptions of light andshadow, inside and out, surface and depth, all to convey the layers ofmeanings in all performance.

The Las Vegas Strip.The 1958 StardustHotel and Casino withneon sign by KermitWayne of YESCO

(Young Electric SignCompany) is on theright (imploded in2007) and the 1961 LaConcha Motel by PaulR. Williams on theleft. Photograph c. 1975.

Eero Saarinen, TWA

Terminal, Idlewild(now Kennedy)Airport, Queens, New York, 1956–62,interior of waitingarea.

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The ‘baby boom’ generated thousands of new schools in suburbs andsmall towns, mostly single-storey elementary schools that emphasized‘day-lighting’ and flexibility. Educators wanted to help children focusmore effectively, while school boards tried to keep costs under controland plan for expansion. A bare-bones facility for West Columbia, Texas,completed in 1952 by the Houston architect Donald Barthelme, waswidely admired. A ‘roller-coaster’ entry canopy for buses enlivened theinexpensive industrial materials, while ‘neighborhoods’ of classroomsfaced landscaped courtyards. When the Supreme Court’s momentous1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, outlawed ‘separate but equal’facilities, school districts in the seventeen Southern states continued tobuild segregated facilities. Paul Rudolph’s Sarasota High School (1959) isone such example. Its gravity-defying concrete screens, stairs and canti-levers dramatize teenage social life while shielding classrooms from thesun – and from black classmates.44 Formal brilliance can sometimesshort-circuit social change.

Frank Lloyd Wright,Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum,New York, 1943–59,interior view fromupper galleries tobase of the ramp.

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Several firms now specialized in educational facilities, notably JohnLyon Reid in northern California and Caudill Rowlett Scott in Bryan,Texas, and Oklahoma City. Caudill’s 1941 pamphlet, ‘Space for Teaching’,now became a major influence on modern schools. Committed to researchand teamwork, crs developed ingenious devices to control the elementsand reduce costs, as well as planning strategies for better learning. SchoolsConstruction Systems Development (scsd) focused on packing allmechanical equipment into a roof system. The Ford Foundation’sEducational Facilities Laboratory (efl) sought to centralize and distillmany such innovations.

A 1947 Presidential Commission report had declared mass highereducation a national mission as returning gi students dramaticallyincreased enrolments at major research universities and small liberal-arts colleges. The University of Miami, hailed internationally as the firstmodern university, completed its first buildings in 1948–9, based onwartime designs by Marion Manley with credit shared by her post-warassociate, Robert Law Weed. Critics praised the flexibility, informalityand climatic adaptations, and the daring engineering of rigid bents andcantilevers – using timber salvaged from military installations. In a sim-ilar vein Henry Klumb built nineteen magnificent tropical-modernbuildings for the University of Puerto Rico between 1946 and 1966, draw-ing in part on his work with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Yale University President A. Whitney Griswold commissioned a widerange of expensive, daring modern buildings, beginning a trend that

Ralph Rapson,Guthrie Theater,Minneapolis,Minnesota, 1959–63,demolished 2006.


continues into this century. Architects fostered ‘identity’ and ‘commu-nity’ with distinctive shapes and textured finishes, the most visible andnotorious being the rough-textured Brutalism of Paul Rudolph’s Schoolof Art and Architecture (1958–64). By 1963 Richard Dober’s CampusPlanning had distilled a ‘scientific’ approach to the ‘multiversity’ based on‘modules’ for continuous growth softened by greenery – two fundamen-tal principles of American college campuses since Colonial times.Expansive modern dormitories were imperative for the expanded studentbodies, including apartments for married gis.

New kinds of educational institutions explored innovative environ-ments for different kinds of learning. When som was selected from 260applicants for the ‘future-oriented’ Air Force Academy in ColoradoSprings (1954–62), the design overcame Congressional resistance byplacing a thin classical veneer of limestone over disciplined industrialModernism – using computers to analyse the structural loads. ErnestKump’s Foothill College (1957–60) in Los Altos Hills, California, provideda model for community colleges with 44 modular pavilions knit togetherby a informal site plan and wide overhangs that sheltered circuitouspathways. Edward Larrabee Barnes’s 1961 Haystack Mountain School atDeer Isle, Maine, embraced nature with its bold roof lines on intercon-nected pavilions covered in cedar shingles. At the other end of thespectrum, major foundations raised funds for advanced research andconference centres in the social sciences at Princeton and Stanford.Despite similar dates and programmes, each was visibly distinctive.

If post-war intellectual life was deeply secular, the larger cultureexperienced a religious revival. Liberal congregations derived spiritualinspiration from abstract forms and dramatic incarnations of space andlight – qualities the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich characterized as

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Donald Barthelme,West ColumbiaElementary School,West Columbia,Texas, 1951–2, bus/carentry.

‘holy emptiness’ and ‘majestic simplicity’.45 Three ‘gathered churches’built between 1948 and 1951, when wartime restrictions remained in effect,mark a first stage of this shift: Eliel Saarinen’s spare Lutheran ChristChurch in Minneapolis; Pietro Belluschi’s numinous wood-frame FirstPresbyterian Church in the lumber town of Cottage Grove, Oregon; andLloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California, with panesof glass set in delicate redwood arches inviting communion with the seaand woodlands. Peter Blake’s An American Synagogue for Today andTomorrow (1954) dismissed ‘meshugothic’ historical styles and praisedmodern synagogues by Percival Goodman, Harrison & Abramowitz,Erich Mendelsohn, Philip Johnson – and the ever-present Frank LloydWright, whose Beth Shalom (1953–9) in the Philadelphia suburb of ElkinsPark has crystalline walls of lustrous corrugated fibreglass.

The scale and visual drama of religious architecture soon escalated.Marcel Breuer’s first buildings (1954–61) for St John’s Abbey andUniversity in Collegetown, Minnesota, highlighted mammoth concreteplates, folded or honeycombed, and a massive trapezoidal bell-tower.Another kind of mega-church now emerged in the suburbs, epitomizedby Neutra’s Community Church (1962) in Garden Grove, California, forthe evangelist Robert Schuller. Its fan-shaped area for 1,400 cars givesdrive-in and walk-in worshippers alike a view of the nave. Schuller’s suc-cess led him to collaborate with Philip Johnson on the nearby Crystal


Marion Manley andRobert Law Weed,University of Miami,Miami, Florida,1948–9.

Cathedral, completed in 1980, calling it a ‘22-acre shopping center forJesus Christ’.46

By the end of the 1950s, more architects and critics were breaking outof strait-laced propriety. Progressive Architecture endorsed plasticity and‘emotional and sensual delight’ in 1958; a 1961 series lauded the benefitsof ‘chaoticism’.47 Most of the nation came to realize the limits of post-warpromises as people confronted the entrenched problems of racism andpoverty throughout the country, especially the deplorable condition ofcities. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’s rivetingassault on the destructive realities of urban renewal, became a best-sellerin 1961; a year later came Michael Harrington’s The Other America:Poverty in the United States and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an attackon chemical pollution. The shock of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in1963 affected the country deeply. The first large-scale urban riots brokeout in Harlem and Los Angeles. Martin Luther King’s March onWashington culminated with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech – then his ownassassination in Memphis. Modern architecture joined the ranks of

Richard Neutra,Community Church,Garden Grove,California, 1962, view from interiorand pulpit out toparking lot.

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social reform once again, this time offering incremental improvementsrather than redemption through master plans.

In such circumstances, the slick, futuristic architecture of the 1964World’s Fair in New York did not seem worth its unprecedented cost,over a billion dollars. Robert Moses’ elaborately orchestrated controlnow appeared heavy-handed. Professional and popular magazinessavaged the New York Pavilion by Philip Johnson, the gigantic ibm logo-building by Saarinen with Charles Eames, and the House of Good Taste(in fact a pluralistic choice of Modern, Contemporary and Traditionalhouses along with an Underground Home). Two very different authorscommented indirectly on choices. Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’evoked the emerging realm of pleasure and theatricality, unconcernedabout moral or aesthetic judgements. These very attitudes led the archi-tecture critic Peter Blake to blast contemporary American culture and itslandscapes as God’s Own Junkyard. In any case, to paraphrase Bob Dylan,the times they were a-changin’ – and so was architecture.


Sandy & Babcock(Diana Crawford, project architect), for the UDC, UniversityPark Apartments,Ithaca, New York, 1973.

Modernists typically strive for radical alternatives to accepted norms.This certainly happened with the myriad attacks on the Establishmentof the 1960s and ’70s – including assaults on Modernism itself. The earlyyears of hope saw violent protests in American cities, yet it still seemedpossible to make the world a better place.1 Youth culture confronted thenation with the exuberance of drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the anger of anti-war and civil-rights protests. Young architects, sometimes still at college,affected the profession as never before, united in resistance to conven-tional curricula and clients, intrigued by emergent lifestyles – a keyneologism of the era. Seizing the gerundive to signal continuous pro-cesses, they were ‘doing architecture’ in multiple unprecedented ways:free-form hippie communes; advocacy groups committed to helping thepoor; environmentalist experiments; lighthearted, camp playfulness;fantastical megastructures; proudly unbuilt ‘paper’ or ‘cardboard archi-tecture’ based on complex theoretical systems.2

Modern architects of all ages turned to historical precedents, seeking toground their designs in scholarly knowledge – or at least intuitive associ-ations. moma in New York helped launch this voyage. Architecture withoutArchitects, Bernard Rudofsky’s popular 1964 book and exhibition, cele-brated the vernacular housing of Mediterranean and African villages,hoping to re-energize Modernism with visual proof that standardizedforms could sustain meaningful communities. This romanticized univer-sal vernacular ignored cultural variations and historical change in favourof ‘timeless’ roots. Drawn to the appealing imagery, architects eagerlyincorporated similar ‘precedents’ or ‘justifications’, at least in presenta-tions, especially for housing. moma then published Complexity andContradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi’s ‘Gentle Manifesto’ of 1966.‘I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning’, explainedVenturi. ‘I prefer “both-and” to “either-or” . . . the difficult unity of inclu-sion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.’3 The book’s rich and eruditehistorical archive was chosen for visual impact. Italian Mannerist distor-tions predominated, but American examples held their own, from

c h a p t e r s i x

Challenging Orthodoxies,1965–1984

Thomas Jefferson to Main Street – judged ‘almost all right’ on the lastpage.

When Peter Eisenman founded the Institute for Architecture andUrban Studies in New York in 1967, he, too, looked to history, uniting aformalist fraternity around the legacy of European avant-gardes fromthe 1920s and ’30s with no regard for political affiliations. The Institutethen launched an exploration of longue durée typologies based onItalian neo-rationalist theories about abstract essences that provide theur-roots of cultures. ‘Theory’ emerged, trans-coding or borrowingideas from rarefied historical, literary and philosophical sources. TheInstitute’s journal Oppositions, published from 1973 to 1984, proclaimedtheory a ‘critical agent’ of destabilization, revealing the alienation ofhuman subjects, the virtuality of objects. Its dissent focused solely on ahermetic architectural world.

Language, often baffling, was crucial to this and other tendencies. TheNew York Five (Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, MichaelGraves and John Hejduk) emerged with a 1969 conference and exhibitionat moma, followed by a 1972 book, Five Architects, with Judith Turner’s ele-gantly abstract photographs of details in their houses. They also marketedthemselves as the Whites, signifying a shared penchant for texts and whitevillas or, more precisely, axonometric drawings of such villas, a representa-tional technique that looked back to Le Corbusier’s interlocking planes ofthe 1920s. Drawings became an ideal – architectural expression uncompro-mised by clients or construction – and a new commodity sold in galleries.

University ParkApartments, Ithaca,site plan.

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The group that came to beknown as the Grays never coa-lesced as a collective entity with amanifesto. The name signalled acounterpoint to the Whites and ashared interest in ambiguousallusions. Robert Venturi, DeniseScott Brown, Charles Moore,Robert Stern and RomaldoGiurgula received the most atten-tion, but many fellow-travellerswere likewise intrigued by thenuances of everyday speech, thepower of familiar narratives, therichness of architectural historyand the brash honky-tonk worldof popular culture. Questioning‘orthodox modern architecture’without discarding it, eschewingvisionary utopias, the Grayswanted to re-enchant the world.They celebrated the modernitythat already existed, especially incities. Venturi and Denise ScottBrown argued that the commer-cial strip of Las Vegas wasanalogous to the Roman piazza,so architects should try to under-stand and ‘enhance’ it. Moore

described his quest for ‘strange and revolutionary and mind-boggling andoften uncomfortable [possibilities] but only using the ordinary pieces’.4

Other forms of culture were also dissolving boundaries. Architectslinked up with friends in the visual arts, theatre, dance and performanceart who shared their euphoric, multi-sensory quest. The composer JohnCage was a hero to young designers who sought an ‘open-ended’ explo-ration of possibilities, while Ann and Lawrence Halprin taught themto think of space in terms of improvised choreographies. MarshallMcLuhan was admired for his vision of media-based ‘allatonceness’.Environments were key to ‘happenings’, earthworks and site-specificsculpture. Young designers created ephemeral sets for avant-garde theatre performances and special-effects ‘total environments’ for explo-sive rock-music concerts at discos, clubs and coliseum performances.

Peter Eisenman, HouseVI, West Cornwall,Connecticut, 1972–6,axonometric drawings.

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Numerous public forums took up these issues. Ada Louise Huxtablebecame the first architecture critic for the New York Times in 1963,defending and expanding the scope of Modernism while engaging invalid critiques. Other newspapers and magazines would follow, renew-ing the role of the public intellectual that Lewis Mumford and HerbertCroly had played earlier in the century. A surge of books and scores of‘little magazines’ appeared around the country, most espousing culturalbreadth and social relevance. Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture in NewYork, Design Book Review in San Francisco, Oz from the University ofKansas School of Architecture and other now defunct journals exploredthe intricacies of real and imaginary worlds.

Historic preservation briefly united all the factions. Modern archi-tects protested unsuccessfully against the demolition of McKim, Mead& White’s magnificent Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan in 1963.Giorgio Cavaglieri (who purportedly invented the term ‘adaptive reuse’for his sensitive, visibly modern alterations) led the campaign to createNew York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, empowered tosave other monuments from ruthless real-estate development. The 1966National Preservation Act quietly signalled a momentous cultural shift.Whereas Americans had previously defined themselves as forward-looking, this act contended that the ‘spirit and direction of the Nationare founded upon and reflected in its historic heritage.’5

Architects also took an active role in the political activism unleashedin the late 1960s. Preservation took a different form in efforts to protectand improve impoverished inner-city neighbourhoods, inverting urban

Mothers of Inventionconcert with theJoshua Light Show atthe Mineola Theater,Long Island, NewYork, 1967.

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renewal’s efforts to eradicate them. The path-breaking 1965–6 legislationof Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society provided funds for housing, health-care facilities, schools and other community buildings in low-incomeneighbourhoods. Harlem, Brooklyn and Pittsburgh initiated the firstcommunity design centres (cdcs), followed by some 2,000 others. PaulDavidoff coined the term advocacy to describe this embryonic move-ment of students and dissident professionals who worked directly withneighbourhood groups.6

Some young architects joined the counter-culture, hoping to under-mine conventional American homes, family life and professionalpractice by withdrawing from the mainstream. They favoured ephemer-al structures that sat lightly on the earth. Ant Farm, a radical collectivebased in San Francisco and then in Austin, Texas, mixed the freedoms of‘nomadology’ and nudity with didactic agitprop performances. Hugeinflatable pvc ‘air pillows’ sounded the alarm about dangers like airpollution. Hippie communes were fond of geodesic domes, seen asmetaphors of cosmic and ecological harmony. Drop City, Colorado,founded in 1965, adopted Steve Baer’s ‘Zomes’, exploded rhomboiddodecahedral domes fabricated from salvaged materials, principallyjunked car tops, then equipped with high-tech solar collectors and windturbines. These and other alternative practices were media-savvy aboutmaintaining networks and astutely marketing spontaneous events. The1970 special issue of Progressive Architecture, ‘Advertisements for a CounterCulture’, described the importance of new technologies – a biosphere,domes, pneumatics, media and computers – in the transformative worldof ‘radical discontent and innovation’.7

Ant Farm, Clean AirPod, pneumaticinstallation and Earth Day ‘event’ at Sproul Plaza,University ofCalifornia atBerkeley, 1970.


Some of the most significant experiments of the era concerned theenvironment. Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) and ReynerBanham’s urban parable Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies(1971) emphasized the power and potential dangers of another history,natural history, warning architects against hubris. The first Earth Dayin 1970 fused biomorphic shapes, advanced technologies and publicparticipation. James Wines and Alison Sky founded Sculpture in theEnvironment (site) that year, recasting architecture as public art thatcriticized modernist disregard for environments. Their ‘de-architecture’installations revealed inevitable processes of change and decay. Bestknown are the eight showrooms for best Products, a profitable mail-order merchandiser. These include the crumbling Indeterminate Façadein Houston (1975), the Rainforest Showroom in Hialeah, Florida (1979)and the Forest Building in Richmond, Virginia (1980), where trees onthe suburban site seem to have taken their revenge on the banal ‘big box’structure.

Paolo Soleri’s ‘arcology’ – architecture respectful of ecology – was anapocalyptic vision of gigantic mixed-use structures that preserved vastsurrounding landscapes. These dense urban environments, some to bea mile high and housing 500,000 people, would reduce pollution andprevent sprawl. A 1970 book and coast-to-coast museum exhibitions ofexquisite Plexiglas models won converts to the cause.8 Soleri began thefirst prototype town, Arcosanti, in 1971 in the Arizona desert nearTaliesin, where he had been apprenticed with Wright in the 1940s. Theconstruction, still ongoing, is mostly hand-crafted by volunteers. The

SITE, Forest Buildingfor BEST, Richmond,Virginia, 1980.

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opec oil embargo of 1973 helped spur the diffuse, but more down-to-earth Alternative Technology movement, which experimented withhybridized strategies like solar panels and earth-sheltered houses.

The dizzying simultaneity of the era sustained multiple groups andexperimental perspectives, all passionate if quixotic. A 1971 cover storyon ‘New Architecture’ in Newsweek featured Louis Kahn and PaulRudolph alongside Arcosanti and Drop City – but not the New YorkFive.9 The space programme, Moog synthesizers, Mod fashion trends,computer graphics and television blurred categories like ‘radical’ or‘Establishment’. Indeed, government agencies appropriated domes,pneumatics and sophisticated multimedia for spectacles like world’sfairs, notably Fuller’s immense geodesic dome at Expo ’67 in Montreal.

When postmodernism came into American architecture in the mid-1970s, it failed to engage most of these permutations.10 Charles Jenckstranslated the term from literary criticism with The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), emphasizing ‘multivalent’ meanings,metaphors and syntax. In codifying the new trend he proposed an elabo-rate stylistic genealogy. Jencks also suggested a lighthearted approachand inferred that Modernism was a puritanical restriction on postmod-ernism’s visual liberation. But Modernism had changed as well, of course.Recognizing that it was no longer possible to transform the worldthrough design, many modern architects withdrew into their own eso-teric games and brandished the idea of autonomy from the larger culture.The shift fit a national mood that Vernon Jordan, President of the UrbanLeague, called ‘antisocial negativism’.11

Modern architecture had indeed fallen from grace, and for many rea-sons. Radicals lambasted its close connections with the destructive forcesof modernization, capitalism and the Vietnam War, while conservativesdenounced the fundamental belief that it could remedy social problems.Architects responded to the fracas in myriad ways, but only two receivedextensive media attention, making them seem the only options. Thewide-ranging eclecticism that rejoiced in symbolic allusions, personalexperience and historical continuities was what came to be called post-modernism. In the opposite corner of the ring, post-structuralist criticsof the profession demanded intellectual rigour and ‘autonomy’.12

Whatever their bent, most architects of the late 1970s retreated to issuesof style – and discourse. ‘Today’s architects do not just build; they com-ment’, noted Ada Louise Huxtable in 1980.13 The discussion usuallyignored the emergent post-industrial, ‘post-Fordist’ service economy,despite a major recession that cost jobs and unsettled lives, includingthose of many designers. Factions instead turned against each other in animpassioned religious war, ignoring their shared if contentious beliefs.


Retrofitting the Corporate Workplace

The sleek glass-box office buildings of the 1950s exploded in the late1960s, an aesthetic detonation set off by an aggressive global economy.Corporations had to keep expanding their operations and dominate overcompetitors to succeed in this high-risk world. The same held for philan-thropic organizations and governmental bureaucracies. Almost half of thenation’s workers were ‘service sector’ employees in large offices. Americanceos wanted to oversee every aspect of their workforces, often makingcompliance the basis for advancement, even when the methods were coop-erative.14 American and European office buildings diverged in the 1970s,one geared principally to economic growth and control over employees,the other to environmental innovations and employee well-being.

The atrium lobby captured the new entrepreneurial spirit in the usa.These tightly guarded jewel boxes of corporate strength accentuatedcentral power. Atriums also redefined urban ‘public space’, much ofwhich now came indoors under private auspices. The earliest and mostpositive example was the Ford Foundation headquarters designed byRoche & Dinkeloo and completed in 1967. Officials for this ambitiousinternational philanthropy wanted an inspiring work environment fortheir staff and an uplifting public presence in New York. Municipal zon-ing laws passed in 1961 had called for a plaza open to the public, so theindoor garden required a variance or waiver. The court, just 0.1 hectare,seemed immense, terracing down from 42nd to 43rd Streets and risingto a skylight. The structure was almost perfectly square, the officesarranged in an ‘L’ to look out onto and across the luxuriant garden. Agrid of Cor-Ten steel encased glass doors and windows in a 1.8-metremodule (0.6 metres larger than the standard size), which amplified thesense of spaciousness and collective purpose. Passers-by shared some ofthese pleasures, enjoying a sun-dappled marvel during the day and aluminous beacon at night.

Peachtree Center, a multi-block mixed-use development (mxd) com-plex in Atlanta, Georgia (dubbed Rockefeller Center South by localboosters), also opened in 1967. John Portman placed an immense gildedatrium at the core of this high-tech citadel. There is unmistakable energyin the 21-storey lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, ‘like Bernini on anacid trip’.15 The restless negative space pulsates with illuminated water-falls, glass-capsule elevators and bowered terraces of rooms rising aboveawe-struck spectators. Peachtree Center was ideal for the tens of thou-sands of newcomers to Atlanta each year, eager for an urbanity thatprovided the order of suburbia, what upbeat books on the city specifiedas ‘only . . . the beautiful, never the ugly or depressing’.16 Its popularity

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Kevin Roche, FordFoundation, New YorkCity, 1966–7, atrium.

Ford Foundation, section.

spurred an expanded complex of some twenty buildings within a decade,all interconnected by sky bridges, hermetic and controlled – an instantand artificial city.

Portman had flouted aia conventions by combining the roles ofarchitect and developer. He first insisted this gave him freedom as adesigner. His 1976 manifesto, The Architect as Developer, audaciouslyclaimed an even higher purpose: he could save declining downtowns byassembling land and capital for large-scale complexes to attract lots ofpeople. The aia soon concurred and elected him a Fellow. The Hyatthotel chain launched a boom in glitzy downtown establishments, andPortman was invited to build ‘power architecture’ in cities from SanFrancisco to Shanghai, each with a grandiose atrium. The most colossaloffspring was the Renaissance Center in Detroit (1973–8), a vast riversidecomplex in mirrored glass fortified by concrete ramparts and raised ona plinth. Portman opened the way for today’s savvy architect-developers,who recognize that architecture begins with the design of financing andproperty. Another legacy is more unsettling. His Modernism created twoarchitectural and urban realms, one inside and carefully packaged, theother outside and left to decline.

Office-building in the 1970s celebrated bold, imposing façades. A 1979moma exhibition, Transformations in Modern Architecture, curated byArthur Drexler, observed that now ‘the object is to conceal rather thanreveal.’17 Brutalism was the inauspicious term for blank concrete sur-faces, a reference to Le Corbusier’s rough-textured sculptural concrete,béton brut. Corporate ceos, still fearful of urban riots, felt assured by thefortress-like solidity of heavy walls with exaggerated roofs and parapets.Windows took unusual forms like slits or portholes, often configuredin irregular patterns. Corporations vied for attention with themastodontic cylindrical corners of Kevin Roche’s Knights of Columbusheadquarters in New Haven (1970), William Pereira’s pyramidalTransamerica Building in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center (1972),and Hugh Stubbins’s Citicorp Building in New York (1977), the last’ssharp-angled crown seemingly cut by a knife. Virtuoso structures rotated, gyrated and turned askew with frantic gestures that quicklybecame clichés.

Mirrored glass was another favourite ‘skin’, a distinctly American fadusing inexpensive materials to create the appearance of glamour. CesarPelli’s bulging Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles (locals call it theBlue Whale) inaugurated mullion-less ‘shaped glass’ in the years1970–75. Colin Rowe’s and Robert Slutzky’s article ‘Transparency: Literaland Phenomenal (Part 2)’, written in 1955–6 but published only in 1971,undermined simple arguments in favour of transparent glass, providing

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an intellectual pedigree for more opaque façades. Most architects simplyenjoyed the amalgam of calculations and accidents of light. Someargued that large glass buildings were rendered invisible because theyreflected the sky. No one bought the sell. Films like The Towering Infernoand Earthquake (both 1975) sensationalized legitimate fears about civicdisasters with shards of glass raining terror on pedestrians. One localcatastrophe delayed the opening of the John Hancock Tower in Boston(1971–6), designed by Henry Cobb for I. M. Pei, when the large windowswere mysteriously sucked out of their frames, crashing down on CopleySquare. (Pressure differentials with the double-paned windows seem tohave caused the problem.) The energy crisis gave impetus to tinted orreflective glass, but workers in neighbouring buildings complained thatmirrored surfaces caused severe glare, heat gain and disorientation.Drexler dryly acknowledged that the trend ‘conveys an indifference tohuman presence most people interpret as hostile’.18

Philip Johnson returned to the limelight with such a building, tradinghis early International-Style rigour for an eclectic, ‘less boring’ redefi-nition of Modernism. He formed a partnership with John Burgee to designthe ids Center in Minneapolis, headquarters for a large financial-servicesfirm, completed in 1972. The original programme of a glass tower becamefour prismatic buildings of different heights and diverse uses, filling adowntown block. Dizzying zigzag shapes (Johnson called them ‘zogs’)made of thousands of small re-entrant angles enlivened the façades. Thecentrifugal focus is a multi-tiered space frame with skyway links to sur-rounding buildings. Below is a giant retail complex called the CrystalCourt, open to the street on all sides, but still resolutely private space.

Texas soon beckoned with a series of grandiose corporate and culturalcommissions for Johnson. Pennzoil Place (1976) became an instant iconfor Houston’s new petroleum-based wealth, its two skewed trapezoidaltowers of ominously dark glass rising alongside a 3-metre slit. Theimpresario-developer Gerald Hines found that ‘extra quality in build-ings would make our product stand out [for] a better class of client’,clients willing to pay between $3 and $4 per square metre more than thegoing rate, even in a depressed market.19 Pennzoil was part of a city-within-a-city that expanded earlier concourse networks. RichardIngersoll has predicted that the ‘fifth largest city in the United States [i.e.Houston] will someday be famous among urbanologists as the firstmodern city without streets’ since there are only elevated freeways andtunnels which connect over 50 downtown buildings extending for a totalof seven kilometers.20

Height remained a premium in this economic climate. Sears,Roebuck, and Company commissioned som to design Chicago’s Sears


Johnson/Burgee, IDS

Center, Minneapolis,1969–72, CrystalCourt.

Tower. With 110 floors it held the title of the world’s tallest building fromits completion in 1974 until 1997. Construction technology could stillgenerate a dramatic public presence. The som partners Bruce Grahamand Fazlur Khan (a structural engineer) developed a system they called‘bundled tubes’ that tied together nine glass skyscrapers of differentheights into one building with interlocked exterior tubing for lateralwind loads. The moma curator Drexler classified this under the rubric of‘cages’, seemingly oblivious to the parallel with Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’of capitalist bureaucracy.

Most New Yorkers resented the gargantuan size of the World TradeCenter, which would only achieve iconic status with its tragic destructionin 2001. Conceived in 1960 in an effort to bring international businesses

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Paul Rudolph,Burroughs/WellcomeHeadquarters,Research TrianglePark, North Carolina,1970–72.

to Manhattan’s flagging financial district, the wtc signalled the power ofthe emerging global economy. Construction took a decade, 1966–76. Thesite encompassed 65 hectares and more than 930,000 square metres ofoffice space. Excavation for the foundations would provide the landfillto build Battery Park City. All this was too much for an architect likeMinoru Yamasaki with no experience in skyscraper design, so EmeryRoth was brought in as an associate. Yamasaki transformed the modernglass skyscraper into two towers with a historicist façade of invertedVenetian Gothic arches at their base, shown on a 1963 Time cover. Buthubris was the major complaint. ‘The World’s Tallest Fiasco’, opined TheNation. ‘The ultimate Disneylandfairytaleblockbuster’, declared AdaLouise Huxtable. ‘It is General Motors Gothic.’21

Meanwhile, the rise of the Sunbelt intensified the fiscal crisis for thenorth-eastern Snowbelt and Midwestern Rustbelt cities like Detroit.Air-conditioned urban skyscrapers seemed oblivious to the environ-ment as well as the street, but sites were important in some suburbanheadquarters. The stacked, lozenge-shaped boxes of Paul Rudolph’sBurroughs-Wellcome Pharmaceutical Company in North Carolina’sResearch Triangle (1970–72) echo the topography of the surroundingridge, while the rhythmic play of light and views in the multifacetedinteriors indeed suggests a flexible ‘living organism’. Emilio Ambasz’sResearch Laboratories for the Schlumberger Oil Company near Austin,Texas (1982), used earth berms to integrate the structures into the land,distributing them through an arcadian landscape. Environmentallyinflected Modernism was even more resonant in California and thePacific North-west. One example is the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters


(1969–71), designed by som’s San Francisco office, with sod roofs andstepped layers nestled in a rural valley in Washington State.

The strong pro-business mood of the late 1970s generated complaintsabout limitations on capital formation. The ‘big bang’ of deregulationand a new tax bill in 1978 converted the welfare state into a corporate-welfare state. President Jimmy Carter embraced ‘public–privatepartnerships’, hoping that private enterprise could solve public problemsif given proper incentives. Desperate to keep large corporations, muni-cipal governments kowtowed to demands for lucrative investmentopportunities. Lax lending requirements and generous tax benefitsspurred new commercial real estate, despite the glut of office space in everylarge city and the dire need for housing.

‘Prestige’ projects with opulent lobbies and crowns were especiallypopular. At once prescient and perverse, Philip Johnson turned frombold geometries to historicism. He was shown clutching a model of NewYork’s att Building (1979–83), with its notorious Chippendale crown, ona 1979 cover of Time. Postmodernism, begun as a critique, had becomea facetious game of quotations and pastiche by ‘architectural monar-chists’, an expression of ‘social and political neo-conservatism’.22 Thevital issue was much larger than nonchalant historicist games, but toomany architects seemed oblivious to anything but stylistic controversiesand developers’ enticements, ignoring the devastation of the late 1970’scrisis in American cities.

New technologies analysed certain kinds of problems. The ‘SystemsApproach’, invoked repeatedly, used game-theory models to comparevarious building systems while ‘fast-track’ construction borrowed‘pre-programming’ from the aerospace industry. These technocraticmethods made it difficult for architects to modify schemes. A few archi-tecture offices took up computer-assisted design (cad), ranging fromBeverly Willis’s small firm in San Francisco to som’s several corporateoffices. The University of California at Berkeley installed its UrbanSimulation Laboratories, while Carnegie-Mellon and mit’s ArchitectureMachine Group (precursor to today’s Media Lab) experimented withdesign technologies that envisioned new kinds of creativity based onalgorithms.23

State-sponsored workplaces put enormous demands on architectswith bureaucratic red tape, budgetary strictures and shifting concepts ofpublic welfare. Richard Meier’s Bronx Developmental Center is apoignant case in point. The New York State Department of MentalHygiene commissioned a total-care residential service for 750 mentallyand physically disabled children in 1970. The site was forlorn, a dismalindustrial tract surrounded by highways and railroad tracks. By the time

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of the building’s completion in 1977, the location and the design causedan uproar. Patient advocates and many psychiatrists attacked Meier’scloistered plan as an ‘obsolete’ concept and the shiny aluminium panelsas ‘inhumane’, while colleagues praised his elegant composition and hissincere efforts to accommodate the children.24 The controversy high-lights both the faddishness of ‘flexible’ late 1960s modules and thesignificance of cultural shifts outside architecture. Psychiatric treatmenthad undergone an about-face during the 1970s: the early model of large-scale respites from the world had swung 180 degrees to one of communitymental health integrated into neighbourhoods. Committed to the firstset of premises and frustrated by a cumbersome process, Meier had notadapted to the shift, nor could his building. The complex was soonabandoned and partially demolished.

Home Again, Home Again

The words housing, home and shelter resonated everywhere in the late1960s and ’70s. The women’s movement contested conventional notionsof home and family. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)attacked suburbia as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’. The ‘typicalhousehold’ went from 70 per cent of the population in the 1950s to 15 percent by 1980. More than half the country’s married women worked out-side the home by 1970, including those with young children. The divorcerate doubled and the birth rate declined. The exhilaration of women’sliberation had its dark side in the feminization of poverty with the mas-sive increase in female-headed households. All these demographic and

Richard Meier, BronxDevelopmentalCenter, New York,1970–77.


cultural upheavals affected the realities of domestic architecture,although the changes were far from profound.

Developers, officials and architects saw new markets in the shift.Unmarried couples, single parents and single people of all ages wantedthe comforts of home together with services like childcare and leisureactivities. Nearly 23 million new dwelling units were built between 1963and 1973, more than in any previous decade. Multi-family housingaccounted for over half the new production until 1976, spurred in partby condominium ownership, made legal in all states in 1968. While someplanned communities sought diverse residents, most were special-purpose enclaves for young single people (many refused children) orretirement villages for the elderly. Economics favoured relatively smoothand unornamented façades with strong, geometrical roofs, usuallysharply angled shed roofs or barrel vaults. Four terms reverberatedthrough the discussions – ‘user needs’, ‘community’, ‘site’ and ‘identity’ –all of which straddled modern innovations and familiar prototypes.

Robert Venturi’s Guild House (1960–63) in Philadelphia announcedthe new sensibility. Sponsored by the Friends Neighborhood Guild, thebuilding provided 91 apartments for elderly men and women who wantedto remain in a rundown area undergoing urban renewal. Venturirespected that desire for continuity with a neighbourhood and the con-cept of home. The six-storey structure engaged the street with slightlyover-scaled, but unabashedly ‘conventional’ materials: brick walls, dou-ble-hung windows and the first self-conscious use of chain-link fencing.A large Roman arch at the top marked the residents’ social area, even asit alluded to Palladio and Louis Kahn for the cognoscenti. The glazed-brick entry featured a sign in gilded block letters, a Pop Art allusion to a

Venturi & Rauch withCope and Lippincott,Guild House,Philadelphia,1960–63.

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marquee or billboard. The gold-anodized ‘tv antenna’ on the roof wasa sculpture, a signifier, for which the architects contributed most of thecost. More important but rarely discussed, the light-filled rooms andhallways were pleasant places and easy to comprehend. While Venturi iscredited with the design, he was strongly influenced by Denise ScottBrown, who became his wife and design partner in 1967. Simultaneouslyprovocative and proverbial, dissonant and calming, the pair asked thatwe see buildings from multiple perspectives.

Subsidized housing (including Guild House) remained well below 5per cent of the American total, compared with more than half in Britainor on the Continent. President Johnson created hud in 1965, a Cabinet-level agency for housing and urban development with a heroic newbuilding by Marcel Breuer. hud announced two principal goals: to coor-dinate all below-market-rate (bmr) construction and to stimulate theprivate home-building industry. Bent on decentralizing, grants favouredSunbelt cities like Dallas and Phoenix. Prefabrication systems seemed asure way to boost production while reducing costs. After all, one thirdof new single-family dwellings were now mobile homes, which PaulRudolph heralded as ‘the 20th-century brick’ that could be stackedsky-high.25 George Romney, Richard Nixon’s hud Secretary, launched

Operation Breakthrough in 1969, pro-viding generous subsidies for 22consortiums of product engineers andmanagement teams. But Romney’s expe-rience at gm was no longer viable, evenfor the auto industry. The prototypeswere expensive, visually un-appealingand riddled with graft. Such efforts topromote industrialized systems onlyfuelled suspicions about visibly modernarchitecture.

Both the right and the left consid-ered public housing truly emblematicof profound problems in Modernismand government.26 Even the presti-gious Douglas Commission on UrbanProblems lamented the supposed neg-ative effect of ‘Le Corbusier’s sky-scrapers-in-a-park’ in 1968.27 Publichousing underwent significant changesas Congress provided higher cost/unitsubsidies for elderly projects, resulting

John Sharratt for theEmergency TenantsAssociation, VillaVictoria, Boston,Massachusetts,1969–82.

in well-designed towers such as San Francisco’s Woodside Gardens(1968). New family housing favoured small infill garden apartments on‘scattered’ or ‘vest-pocket’ sites. But the notorious super-blocks far out-numbered either of these initiatives, and conditions worsened aseconomic restructuring increased unemployment levels for urban blackmales and strained family bonds. As the crisis deepened, hud gaugedrents to incomes and gave preference to those with no other options.Local authorities subsequently went broke and froze maintenance budg-ets at already inadequate levels. The modernist project was reduced to‘the projects’: unemployed African-American single mothers on welfarewarehoused in dreary, dangerous towers and slabs.

Public housing, less than 2 per cent of the nation’s total housingstock, became a looming presence in the national imagination.Resentments and apocalyptic fears festered as Americans grew increas-ingly apprehensive about the future of their cities. The urban designerOscar Newman’s Defensible Space (1972) used ‘scientific’ graphs to arguethat high-rise towers inevitably cause crime. The ‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’falsely contended that architects had once lavished awards on this nowinfamous project. Its demolition became an easy target for pundits likeCharles Jencks, who proclaimed that ‘Modern Architecture died in StLouis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m.’28 President Nixon declareda moratorium on federal housing subsidies in 1973, using specious asso-ciations like this without mentioning conservative opposition orwidespread agency scandals.

Innovative non-profit organizations partially offset the devolutionof responsibility from the federal government. A desire for modestyfavoured ‘urban vernaculars’. New York State’s Mitchell-Lama HousingProgram sponsored rental housing like Davis/Brody’s Riverbend inHarlem (1964–7), a skilful levitation of row-house units complete withindividual ‘stoops’ as entries, varied massing, playgrounds and walkwaysthat are visible, pleasant and safe – a type the firm adapted elsewhere togood effect. The Urban Development Corporation (udc) built 23 hand-some projects from 1968 to 1975. Good site planning characterized bothlow-rise enclaves and high-rise agglomerations, including thirteendiverse interventions at Twin Parks in the Bronx. Kenneth Frampton ofiaus collaborated with Ted Lieberman of udc on Marcus Garvey ParkVillage in Brooklyn, a minimalist medium-density scheme influenced byNewman’s Defensible Space and displayed at moma in 1973.

Similar initiatives elsewhere also favoured low-rise, medium-densitymodern housing with vernacular inflections, especially when tenantsparticipated in deliberations. The Boston architect John Sharratt’s VillaVictoria was built in six phases over thirteen years (1969–82) with fund-

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ing from multiple non-profit organizations. The 750 units were a ‘patch-work quilt’ of new and restored row houses and apartment towers linkedby an animated plaza, a priority for the Puerto Rican residents in theEmergency Tenants Association.29 Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s raciallyintegrated projects in Washington, dc, and St Louis combined historicpreservation, conventional wood-frame dwellings and ample publicservices interconnected through landscaped pathways, although severalcritics disdained her conspicuously familiar references as overly ‘cute’,too much like the neighbourhoods they replaced.30

California explored wide-ranging alternatives. A resurgence of interestin rural-housing reform led Sanford Hirshen to build or expand nineteenmigrant farm workers’ communities from 1965 to 1975, experimentingwith inventive techniques such as folded-plate structures in treated paper.Most new housing was intentionally more familiar. Now critical of earlierurban-renewal projects, San Francisco built scores of block-sized varia-tions on wood-frame, shed-roofed clusters with shared outdoor spaces inthe Western Addition. Rehabilitated Victorian-era housing was inter-spersed among the new projects. But here as elsewhere, the supply ofsubsidized dwellings lagged far behind the ever-growing need.

Market-rate housing often followed the best design strategies ofsubsidized enclaves. Some apartment towers took dramatic shapes like


Sanford Hirshen withSim van der Ryn,housing for migrantfarmworkers, Indio,California, 1965.

cylinders and interlocking geometries and colonnades, especially popu-lar in the Sunbelt. A new generation of agile modernists burst on thescene in Miami with the vibrant colours and playful shapes ofArquitectonica. The Atlantis (1978–82) was featured in the openingsequence of the television series Miami Vice, inaugurating a new form ofbranding. New York’s Battery Park City Authority commissioned multi-ple teams of private developers and notable architects for more than6,000 ‘high-end’ apartment units. Cooper/Eckstut’s 1979 master plan forthe 37 hectares of downtown property broke conventions by makingpublic space a priority, even along the waterfront. The architecture wasstifled by guidelines that imposed an artificial diversity and ‘contextual’references to Manhattan’s pre-World War Two past. Since Battery Park

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Arquitectonica,Atlantis Building,Miami, 1978–82.


City was publicly owned and operated by the udc, millions of dollars insurplus profits were set aside for low-income housing in other parts ofthe city, monies that disappeared into Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s budget.Good intentions easily go awry without vigilance.

Architect-developer teams tried to counter sprawl with ‘clusters’ ofattached ‘town-homes’ that updated the garden apartments of the 1920swith imaginative site plans. The privately owned town of Reston,Virginia, suggested an auspicious prototype for compact developmentof large-scale ‘urbanized suburbs’. Federal New Towns included TheWoodlands outside Houston; Irvine, California; and two New-Towns-in-Town, Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis and Roosevelt Island alongsideManhattan. Architects evoked irregular ‘vernacular’ settlements, thefine-grain patterns of European ‘carpet housing’, or brash obliques anddiagonals. In principle, cluster housing protected local ecologies,although many such landscapes consisted of lawns, artificial lakes andgolf courses.

Environmentalist sympathies affected large-scale elite enclaves, threeof which stand out. Sea Ranch on the rugged northern California coastepitomized the modern arcadian ideal of simple luxury in a wildernesspreserve. Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (mltw) completed the firstcondominium group in 1965, nestled in an unprepossessing corner ofthe 2,000-hectare meadow. They adapted the unadorned redwoodsheathing of local barns and sheds with varied roof lines that followedthe windswept crests of cypress trees and rocky promontories. The dis-tinctive amalgam of sensuousness and rigour extended to the interiorspaces, and to countless replications on much smaller sites all over the country.

Antoine Predock explored similar principles for La Luz (1967–73), adense group of 100 luxury condominium units north of Albuquerque,New Mexico, whose owners protect the surrounding 200 hectares ofbosque and mesa in a land trust. Solar heating and cooling were combinedwith a time-tested local material, sun-dried adobe covered with mud-coloured stucco, keeping the interiors a pleasant temperature year roundwhile ensuring acoustical privacy at close quarter. While Predock’s massinginevitably evokes the region’s pueblo architecture, the plain, unadornedsurfaces are sculptural. The site plan creates what he calls ‘abstract land-scapes’, a modern sensibility at once local and universal.31

The town of Seaside also fits into this category of modern site planning, even though modern architects typically revile Duany/ Plater-Zyberk (dpz) and their picture-perfect, 32-hectare Florida town with itsneo-traditional dwellings and rigid design code. The core principle ofdpz’s master plan (1979–80) was familiar typologies related to the street,

Antoine Predock, La Luz, Albuquerque,New Mexico, 1967–73.

La Luz, site plan.

but progressive commitments to environmental protection, public tran-sit and public open space were equally important. Hoping to provide animage of diverse experimentation, they invited modernists like StevenHoll, who built a Hybrid Building. Even if the overall impressionremains monolingual, Andrés Duany’s messianic calls for expert designand his declarations of war against the status quo had a distinctly modernring that helped launch a crusade.

Discussion about modern single-family houses has usually ignoredthis larger context, although luxury dwellings are homes and marketcommodities as well as architectural statements. Complex geometriesand dynamic sections literally broke out of the box, a striking contrastto the economical simple volumes of market-rate housing. As theprosperity and cultural freedoms of the 1960s stimulated architecturalexperiments, inflation saw house values double. Rising income inequal-ities in the narcissistic ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s brought increased costsand cachet to designer houses.

The archetypal design of the era for architects, even those who hatedit, was Robert Venturi’s home for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in ChestnutHill, Pennsylvania, completed in 1964 and soon famous as the Mother’sHouse. The design juxtaposed layers of walls, spaces and historical ref-erences. A study in architectonic paradox – Venturi called it ‘complexand simple’, ‘open and closed’, ‘big and little’ – the house manifested itsdesigner’s intelligence and practicality. He made awkwardness a virtue,like the Italian Mannerists who purposefully sought to disrupt perfec-tion. The façade, seemingly symmetrical, challenged first impressionswith elements that were subtly off-centre, disjointed and literally split.This ‘almost symbolic image of a house’ emphasized ‘almost’ with stud-ied ambiguities and pleasures.32 The plan skewed the placement of wallsand stairs, generating a complex, almost crowded interior that invitedimaginative musing. Venturi’s abstract concepts enhanced his apprecia-tion of everyday realities.

Richard Meier’s Smith House, near Darien, Connecticut (1965–7),used elementary geometries in a more abstract manner. The woodcladding was painted white, a sculptural object in a magnificent land-scape. Expansive glass on the main façade overlooked a rocky coast.Stairs and balconies created overlapping cubist spaces, inside and out.Peter Eisenman’s numbered series of ‘post-humanist’ houses used elab-orate mathematical codes to determine the overlaid planes, but surelyhe enjoyed and to some extent calculated disruptive gestures like acolumn through the dining table or the bed in House vi. A book byhis client Suzanne Frank described the ‘annoyances’, ‘inconvenient ele-ments’ and ‘compromises’ she and her husband confronted. In 1974 the


Venturi & Short,Vanna Venturi House,Chestnut Hill,Pennsylvania,1959–64, mainfaçade.

Vanna Venturi House,ground-floor plan.

Vanna Venturi House,living room.

Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri mocked the American avant-garde’sindulgent pleasures for capitalism’s new elite as ‘architecture in theboudoir’.33

Some houses, highly acclaimed at the time, are less well knowntoday. Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty caused a stir with their1965 house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Life praised the sensuouspoured-concrete curves as ‘sculpture to live in’. The young husband-and-wife architects were principally concerned with environmentalfactors and an open, non-hierarchical family life. The plan allowedthem to do away with doors, while encouraging a palpable sense ofmovement and ‘hesitations’ – their word for places to reflect or inter-act.34 The design /build firm Jersey Devil connected aestheticexperimentation with a strong environmentalist purpose, fusingsophisticated technology with hands-on construction. A nomadic col-lective, they lived on site throughout each project, deeply committed tothe particularities of place and process, juxtaposing steel and computers

Richard Meier, Smith House, Darien,Connecticut, 1965–7,living room.


with found objects and natural materials. As architect-contractors theydefied the profession’s gentlemanly traditions as much as John Portmanhad done.

Frank Gehry’s series of inventive urban dwellings began with the1977–8 adaptations to his own home in Santa Monica, California.Neighbours protested, but architects acclaimed the lyrical collages ofraw construction materials like chain-link fencing and rough timber.Brash gestures were interwoven with poetic references to the originalhouse (a 1920s builder’s bungalow), the legacy of twentieth-century artand architecture, and Gehry’s own family memories. While intentionallymodest and slightly aggressive, this house would become an iconicobject when he rose to celebrity status in the 1990s.

Residential architecture of the 1970s challenged conventions whileenhancing design and domestic lives. Most Americans saw only threeextremes: expensive custom-designed houses, distressed public-housingtowers and large-scale multi-unit developments. These were the images

Mary Otis Stevensand Thomas McNulty,Stevens-McNultyHouse, Lincoln,Massachusetts, 1965.

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Jersey Devil, HillHouse, La Honda,California, 1977–9.

Frank Gehry, GehryHouse, Santa Monica,California, 1977-8,kitchen.

of ‘Modernism’ when the mid-decade recession and urban-developmentpolicies wreaked havoc on moderate-income housing. A conservativebacklash viewed all of these changes as ‘anti-family’. Even positive trendstook on dark connotations. Local governments granted special zoningprivileges to large, relatively expensive Planned Unit Developments(puds) with dense configurations of condominiums and ample openspace. Television specials about ‘the housing crisis’ portrayed this as thenecessary if less-than-desirable solution for those who could not afford‘real’ homes in the suburbs. Identified with economic and social disrup-tions, even purposefully moderate and ecological modern architecturecame to be seen as an assault on the American way of life.

Marketing an Open Society

The exuberant public spaces of the late 1960s and ’70s promised new kindsof freedom, some celebrating collective expression, others geared to partic-ular groups. Presidents Johnson and Nixon invested in modern publicarchitecture for education and the arts. States and municipalities did thesame, often partnered with private businesses and cultural institutions. AsAmericans confronted a rise in urban violence, two seemingly oppositespatial paradigms defined a new degree of control over ‘free’ environmentsand activities. The interior ‘street’ brought the public realm indoors.Simultaneously, echoing office buildings of the era, exterior plazas of ‘openrooms’ were designed for surveillance and control as much as pleasure.

Progressive or ‘open’ schools embraced an energetic aesthetic of irreg-ular clusters, diagonal rotations and animated layers. Spatial libertiesaligned with pedagogical reforms like team-teaching and non-gradedgroups. Columbus, Indiana, a town of 40,000 inhabitants, inaugurated aprogramme for innovative schools funded by a philanthropic local busi-nessman, J. Irwin Miller. The utopian mission extended to other buildingtypes as well, making Columbus a virtual museum of modern Americanarchitecture. One of the best examples was Mt Healthy ElementarySchool by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer (1970–72). The public façades mixedreferences to familiar late nineteenth-century motifs such as industrialwindows and red-brick schoolhouses, although these walls were thin andplayful, like other cardboard motifs of the 1970s. The interior came alive,a kinetic sculpture with exposed high-tech elements in vivid coloursalong a circulation spine with niches, changes in level and moveable par-titions along a diagonal ‘street’. Learning could be fun and unstructured,at least for young children. Urban intermediate and high schools, on theother hand, often resembled another prime architectural motif of theera, the fortress or prison.

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As baby-boomers reached college age, federal programmes expandedopportunities for higher education. College enrolment soared to over6 million students in the mid-1960s, four times the post-war figure.Seeking to mask the increased scale, architects stressed illusions of spon-taneity, ‘planned chaos’ and community with contrived simulations ofthose goals. Student centres proliferated, while large ‘multiversity’ cam-puses were subdivided into smaller clusters. The architecture tended tobe imperious, even in small schools and historically black colleges likeTuskegee. som’s Walter Netsch began the move by applying his ‘FieldTheory’ to the new University of Illinois campus at Chicago Circle, com-pleted in 1965. Elevated concrete ‘expressways’ for pedestrian trafficsurrounded a huge rooftop ‘agora’ above the Brutalist-inspired class-room buildings.

New York and Massachusetts hired major architects to design out-sized, often overbearing campuses. California commissioned three newuniversities. San Diego and Irvine were huge concrete behemoths, butSanta Cruz was known for its open-minded teaching and informality,with each college isolated from the others in lush natural landscapes.Charles Moore/mltw’s Kresge College (1965–74) was a ‘non-institutional’alternative designed with student and faculty participation. A pedestri-an ‘street’ formed the spine of an intimate village, its picturesqueirregularity responding to trees and terrain. If Kresge was easily dismissed as a romantic stage set, the firm’s Pembroke Dormitories at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1970–75), won

Hardy HoltzmanPfeiffer, Mt HealthyElementary School,Columbus, Ohio,1970–72, interior.

Mt HealthyElementary School,floor plan.


resounding praise. Spatial and budgetary restrictions had inspired anurbane design built around a multi-tiered internal court. The densecomplex engaged the neighbouring streets, even in the choice of glazedcoloured brick, a material simultaneously prosaic and scintillating.

Government architecture displaced the solemn New Monumentalityof post-war modernists on several fronts. When President Johnson’s GreatSociety programme funded projects in poor neighbourhoods, ‘community

SOM/Walter Netsch,University of Illinois,Chicago Circle campus, Chicago,Illinois, 1962–5, central ‘agora’ and classroom buildings.

Donlyn Lyndon/MLTW,Pembroke College,Brown University,Providence, RhodeIsland, 1968–70,courtyard.

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control’ encouraged local residents’ involvement in decision-making anddesign. Indeed, Johnson himself endorsed ‘maximum feasible participa-tion’, sometimes as a substitute for new buildings and services. Establishedarchitects’ offices donated their services pro bono; small firms like FridayArchitects of Philadelphia and the all-women Open Design Office in NewYork specialized in community centres. These ‘storefront’ facilities com-bined renovations with new infill buildings to repair tears in the existingfabric of streets. Drawing on the neutral sets of modern stagecraft, thesearchitects delighted in the possibilities of recycled and cheap materials.But the larger political picture shows the omnipresent shadow of theVietnam War. Aesthetics had to be affordable in Johnson’s War on Poverty,in part because the cost of that conflict radically depleted funds for hous-ing and other reforms. If liberal policy-makers sought to win ‘hearts andminds’ in the ghettos, they also trained ‘counter-insurgency’ police andincreased the number of armouries and prisons, soon achieving the world’shighest rate of incarceration.

Expanding federal, state and municipal governments commissionedlarger buildings. Complex massing supposedly encouraged democracyby revealing the inner workings of power and bureaucracy. The youngfirm of Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles won the national competitionfor Boston’s City Hall (1962–8), the centrepiece of an extensive new gov-ernment centre. This was ‘Action Architecture’, in Gerhard Kallmann’swords, a syncretic mixture of ad hoc events and organized movement.


Hodgetts and Fung with RobertMangurian/StudioWorks, SouthsideCommunity Center,Columbus, Ohio, 1980,view of courtyard.

A radial plaza conjured up the ‘outdoor rooms’ of Siena and Italian hilltowns, then penetrated into the building through ramps and steps thatimplied accessible officials. In fact, the space was rigidly composed yetdisorientating, especially the huge atrium lobby. The Brutalist concretesuggested a fortified barricade and the weight of authority. No one couldmatch the protean scale of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s Empire StatePlaza in New York, also known as the Albany Mall (1969–78), with tenhigh-rise buildings atop a six-storey platform and an eerie subterraneanconcourse. Grandiose ‘public’ gestures became so ostentatious that aninevitable reaction set in, evident in ‘contextual’ or colourful new post-modernist buildings and renovations of historic structures.

Government buildings were mostly a matter of boosterism andbureaucracy by the 1970s, since private corporations and real-estatedevelopers now figured prominently in local decision-making. Theyconvinced officials of two basic principles: first, that urban constituen-cies were investors and consumers, not citizens; second, that peoplethought of cities in terms of imagery and entertainment, not services.Neo-liberals argued that municipal funds were supposed to keep cities‘competitive’ and ‘attractive’ with ‘people-magnets’ which would draw

wealthy tourists and residents. The ‘centre’trumped the mere building. Modernarchitecture predominated with new urbanshopping centres, performing-arts centres,convention centres and arts centres. Spark-ed by Portman’s Hyatt Hotels, the emerging‘hospitality industry’ built lavish hotelsalongside the new cultural emporia. Fran-chise motels and restaurants followedmediocre formulas, still plastic but lackingthe idiosyncratic camp of earlier ‘Googie’architecture. By the time Venturi and ScottBrown published Learning from Las Vegasin 1972, the neon world of the Strip waschanging. Recent laws allowed corporationsto be licensed as casino owners, resulting inhuge high-rise towers behind lavish special-effects spectacles.

Fascination with local history soughtto offset the glitz. Even race and ethnicitywere recast as claims about cultural ‘identity’ morphed inequalities into partic-ularities that might attract tourists eager

Harry Weese,MetropolitanCorrectional Center,Chicago, 1975.

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for novelty. Japanese-American merchantsjoined with the San Francisco RedevelopmentCenter under Rai Okomoto in 1968 to createNihonmachi, a cultural and economic centrefor the area called Japantown, a themed com-plex of shops surrounding a landscaped plazaand Minoru Yamasaki’s new Peace Pagoda. LosAngeles sponsored a similar fusion a decadelater at Korean Village. Italian-Americans inNew Orleans hired Charles Moore’s UrbanInnovations Group to design the Piazza d’Italia(1975), a ‘destination’ that ultimately failed,largely because the surrounding hotel, storesand offices never materialized.

A few cities rejected commercialized themedenvironments in favour of settings that fusedold and new, building and landscape, com-monalities and differences. Lawrence Halprinused dynamic concrete geometries for sculpturefountains in Portland, San Francisco and Seattle.These structures invited spontaneous partici-

pation, but they were confrontational too, often built over freeways orresembling the ruins of freeway extensions that had been stopped bycitizen protests.

One of the most visited national-park sites in the country is theMartin Luther King Jr Center adjacent to Dr King’s church on SweetAuburn Avenue, the center of black Atlanta in its glory days. Plans forthe mlk Center were fraught with tension after the rise of Black Powerand the violent ghetto riots of the late 1960s. These were compoundedby conflicts between federal agencies, the King family, the neighbour-hood and the city government, all jockeying for cultural capital andeconomic benefits. The New York firm Bond Ryder James eventuallywon the commission in 1976 and completed it in 1981. The materials arehumble: concrete columns with local wood and brick. The sequence ofspaces repeats familiar patterns as if the complex had evolved over time.This is an eloquent, understated Modernism, a fitting expression ofKing’s aspirations for justice.

For the most part, municipal and regional governments partneredwith private sponsors for extravagant blockbuster facilities. As CharlesMoore said in 1965, fascinated but also saddened by the shift: ‘You HaveTo Pay for the Public Life.’35 Aquariums were a big draw. Superstar athletes on big-league teams spurred huge sports stadiums, ‘the civic icon

Kallmann, McKinnell& Knowles, BostonCity Hall and Plaza,1960–67, PortlandCement companyadvertisement.


Bond Ryder James &Associates, MartinLuther King, Jr Centerfor Non-ViolentSocial Change,Atlanta, Georgia,1976–81.

of the late-20th century’, one architect told the Wall Street Journal, ‘theequivalent of a cathedral’.36 Early examples of engineering prowessinclude Houston’s 1965 Astrodome with its retractable roof, an electronicscoreboard and surface parking for 30,000 cars. The Louisiana Superdomeand Pontiac Silverdome (both 1975) soon upped the ante. ‘Build It andThey Will Come’ was the mantra. Higher taxes and special bonds werenecessary, but prestige and economic benefits were supposedly guaran-teed. In fact, most new stadia showed a net loss.

Performing-arts centres provided cultural capital for a new urbanelite that dreaded the thought of being provincial. These places did notjust house culture; they transformed it with mass middle-class audiencesfor blockbuster performances. Grandiose scale and opulence certainlydefined the first example, New York City’s Lincoln Center, begun underRobert Moses in 1955, its initial phase completed in 1966. With Harrison& Abramowitz only nominal leaders, Philip Johnson took charge of themaster plan, orchestrating the architecture to resemble Michelangelo’sCampidoglio complex in Rome with repeating colonnades and uniformroof heights and entries. The extravagant size and gaudy ornamentationstressed the audience’s performance as much as that of the artists. (Theacoustics in the Philharmonic suffered from its grandiose scale until it

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was rebuilt in 1976.) But the Moses approach to urban renewal was themajor problem. Lincoln Center was raised above the streets on a plinth,conspicuously aloof from the city streets, oblivious to the informal vital-ity and diversity that are essential to artistic creativity.

Hundreds of cities from coast to coast and deep in the heartland invest-ed in performance centres. The Kennedy Center in Washington, dc,(1958–64) and the Los Angeles Music Center (1958–67) emulated NewYork’s model of safe, sanitized grandiosity. Others opted for bold Brutalistgeometries, while a few chose vibrant, small-scale modern architecture.John Johansen’s Mummers Theatre in Oklahoma City (1964–70), now theStage Center, has brightly coloured concrete boxes suspended vertiginously,linked by ramped circulation tubes, looking somewhat like a giantTinkertoy construction. Johansen called his approach ‘Kinetics’, a very1960s celebration of joy, change and human energy. His sketch for the

John Johansen,Mummers Theater,Oklahoma City,Oklahoma, 1964–70,aerial view (today theStage Center).

Mummers Theater,sketch of section.


building captures the anticipated animation of a bubble diagram. Like theavant-garde theatre productions performed here, the building embodiedself-conscious improvisation and experimentalism geared to smaller audi-ences. The intentionally haphazard assembly rejects any visible rules ofcomposition. Some critics were outraged by the structure’s fragmentation,yet awkwardness can be a virtue in buildings that encourage artists andaudiences to explore unconventional forms of expression.

The visual arts spilled over into museum practice and architecture.Artists turned to ‘alternative spaces’ they defined themselves, some ofwhich became major institutions in their own right. The largest and mostpotent is the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where Donald Juddbegan to renovate a series of small, spare wood-frame houses and enor-mous industrial sheds in 1972, later interspersing these with his ownconcrete and aluminium boxes to create an elegant enfilade. The appro-priate setting revealed the theatricality inherent in minimal art, what thecritic Michael Fried called its ‘objecthood’, by emphasizing subtle varia-tions in light and spatial context.37 Artists likewise preferred FrankGehry’s Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles of 1983, a funky indus-trial warehouse only slightly modified (now the Geffen Contemporary)to the polished museum by Arata Isozaki that opened in 1986.

The ‘museum industry’ borrowed public-entertainment tactics withamenities such as shops and restaurants and occasionally great architec-ture.38 The category expanded to include every possible kind of collection.Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum (1961–8) grouped three separate troves ofhistory and natural history in discreet, almost invisible structures beneathlandscaped public terraces. But art museums were top of the line. I. M. Pei’shuge East Wing expansion of the National Gallery of Art in Washington(1974–8) asserted authority with commanding geometrical shapes andblank façades. Richard Meier became master of the genre with the HighMuseum in Atlanta (1980–83). Gracefully expanding the interlocking whiteplanes and curves characteristic of his houses, he created exhilarating spa-tial experiences as diagonal ramps accentuated the complex play of light,shadows and movement adjacent to contemplative spaces for viewing art.

The work of Louis Kahn defies easy classification. His Kimbell Museumin Fort Worth, Texas (1966–72) is inspiring but still, in Kahn’s words,a ‘friendly home’, since both the architect and the museum’s director,Richard Brown, wanted an institution that would convey dignity and joywithout intimidation. Kahn achieved this with a graceful complex of sixparallel concrete vaults that shelter an entrance court, enclosed galleries,garden courts and a stepped reflecting pool. Reaching back to ‘simplebeginnings’, the curvature of the vaults was based on cycloid geometry, anancient Mediterranean shape. The vaulting allows gallery spaces to be free

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Louis Kahn, KimbellMuseum, Fort Worth,Texas, 1966–72.

Kimbell Museum,upper floor plan.

Kimbell Museum, galleries.

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of fixed walls while abundant natural light intensifies the elemental powerof the structure and the open spaces. Daylight spills through openings atthe centre of each vault onto upturned aluminium reflectors, infusing thetravertine interior walls with the ‘luminosity of silver’ against the ‘liquidstone’ of the concrete.39 Kahn’s ability to imbue Modernism with emotion-al intensity, functional necessities and ordinary life provides a connectorbetween diverse, seemingly antagonistic architectural groups.

Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in 1980 proclaimed ‘TheSecond American Revolution’. His administration advocated private eco-nomic gain and ‘traditional’ values, scuttling any residual social ideals.40

Reagan even removed the solar panels that President Carter had installedon the White House roof. Tom Wolfe’s simplistic, immensely popular1981 book captured the mood. From Bauhaus to Our House lampoonedmodern architecture as an ‘invasion’ of European ‘princes’ committed toworkers’ housing and subservient Americans intimidated by a ‘colonialcomplex’. Whites and Grays alike ‘enunciated suitably obscure theories’ torevile anything that looked ‘too American, too parochial, and too bour-geois’. Intellectuals on the left described the same situation with a twist.The geographer David Harvey argued that the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s had driven a frenzied search for enticing display to suggest an open,pluralistic society. Postmodernism and late Modernism were caught inthe same system, beholden to wealthy investors rather than Europeanarchitects. For Harvey, modern architecture had ‘shamelessly sold itself tothe highest bidder without a shred of critical resistance’.41

Shock value was part of the calculated appeal in the polyphonous‘play’ of contemporary architecture. Philip Johnson cheerfully pro-claimed: ‘I am a whore’ to a privileged group of colleagues in 1982.‘I do not believe in principles’, he added for effect, ‘in case you haven’tnoticed’.42 Narcissistic nonchalance became a sign of creative independ-ence. Important architects were talked about on first-name terms –Philip, Peter and Bob – since everyone knew who they were (or scurriedto find out). The media and big commissions made architects marketable,assuring major commissions for the select few. If this attitude liberatedAmerican design processes and forms, it also unmoored architects froman earlier sense of responsibility.43

No epoch can be reduced to an essence or a facile dichotomy. Culturalclichés about ‘the architecture of Reaganism’ and facile paeans to ‘hetero-geneity’ are too one-dimensional, eliding anything that fails to fit the label.The early 1980s expanded opportunities for women, Asian, Latino andAfrican-American architects. Some of the best-known works were exqui-site small buildings, often constructed on restricted budgets. Fay Jones’sThorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas (1979–80), sits atop a

stone base in a wooded glade. Gothic Revival allusions to vaulting as aforest connect the structure to medieval Christianity, yet the elementalqualities suggest a deistic worship of nature. So, too, with Maya Lin’sVietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, dc (1982), in which a youngfemale undergraduate conveyed the power of abstract sculptural formand inspired connection to the earth. Metaphors resonated deeply,evoking the land and tectonics, human memories and aspirations.Eschewing superficial user-friendly iconography as well as hermetichubris, this modern architecture reverberated within the discipline andfar beyond it.

Fay Jones,Thorncrown Chapel,Eureka Springs,Arkansas, 1979–80.


Frank Gehry, FrederickR. Weisman ArtMuseum at theUniversity of Minne-sota, Minneapolis,1990–93, postcard.

The ‘new economy’ became pre-eminent in the mid-1980s, affectingalmost every aspect of architecture from programmes and façades to thevery nature of the discipline. Delirious spending unleashed a bloatedincrease in the scale of consumer objects including buildings. Affluentindividuals commissioned extravagant houses while global capital helpedfinance an interconnected world of mega-projects. Entrepreneurial citiesinvested in name-brand architecture as ‘catalysts’, hoping to stimulate aflow of outside investors, wealthy residents and tourists, including near-by suburbanites.1 Haphazard development in the suburbs shifted towardslarge master-planned enclaves and gated residential communities, alsoknown as ‘common interest developments’, predominantly neo-tradi-tional enclaves under the aegis of leviathan home-building corporationsthat rarely hired professional architects. The media began to track ahandful of ‘boutique’ or ‘signature’ architects, beginning with FrankGehry after he traded the colliding elements in cheap materials of hisearlier buildings for sinuous curves in expensive metals. Through theseyears, if only occasionally in the spotlight, hundreds of resilient modernarchitects around the country, most in relatively small practices, gener-ated imaginative designs for workplaces, public buildings andmoderate-income housing.

Networks were essential, given the pace of change and complexity ofknowledge in every field. The nea created the Mayors Institute on CityDesign in 1986, bringing mayors and key administrators from more than200 cities together with designers and academics to discuss local initia-tives from infrastructure to public housing. The structure ofarchitectural practice underwent major shifts in the 1990s as large cor-porate firms merged, spawned regional offices and greatly increasednon-design staff in public relations, construction management andother business skills. Once reluctant to show conspicuous commercialambitions, architects were touting their savvy about real-estate, publici-ty and communications strategies, some to engage ‘the market’, others topress beyond its narrow conventions.

c h a p t e r s e v e n

Disjunctures and Alternatives,1985 to the Present

Computers were soon omnipresent, catapulting architecture farbeyond the previous generation of cad and computer-aided manufac-ture (cam). Gehry appropriated technologies from the automotive,naval and aerospace industries, making fluid shapes feasible to build, ifeconomical only in relative terms. Young architects then adapted 3-dmodelling programmes from movie special effects and animation tocreate sinuous surfaces. Greg Lynn called his shapes ‘blobitecture’ andissued messianic assertions of a liberating new Zeitgeist.2 Every technol-ogy has its drawbacks, of course. Speed encouraged dramatic imageryover more deliberative considerations; programmes become design

William Massie, BigSky House (OwensHouse), near WhiteSulpher Springs,Montana, 1999–2001,illustrated inMetropolitan Homemagazine (November2003).

Digital fabricationversioning for Big SkyHouse.

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determinants rather than tools. Computers forced many architects tocut time, costs and the quality of materials, thus reducing design stan-dards. Some cleverly turned the tables, simplifying schemes, then goingdirectly into production in order to customize moderate-cost buildingsadapted to their sites. William Massie told Business Week that he usedcomputer technology to go back to ‘the true beginning – when modernisthomes were reasonably priced’.3

The Internet made research a buzzword, providing a base for designanalysis, programs, specifications – and promotional imagery. Reams ofdata were compiled into vivid maps and ‘datascapes’, sometimes trans-lated directly into morphology. Gensler and oma created offshootresearch units to study topics like workplace performance and brandingstrategies. Adopting a business model that delivered up-to-date genericproducts, more firms specialized in particular kinds of buildings, usingdetailed knowledge to reduce costs and maximize profits. Intrepiddesigners adopted scientific or management models of innovation,‘looking for loopholes’ within existent systems. Small offices collaboratedand augmented the range of in-house knowledge, as with New York’sSharples Holden Pasquarelli (shop), whose principals combined designskills with training in fields like financial management, allowing them totackle large and small projects in ways that accentuate ‘performance ratherthan form’.4

Building skins took on an ethereal lightness of being with advancesthat combined thinness, translucency, permeability and environmentaladaptations. Architects were often directly engaged in the developmentof ‘ultramaterials’ that met performance criteria never before imagined.5

Structural fibreglass and polymers, foamed aluminium, moiré and meshmetals, subtle patterned glass and seemingly weightless concrete directlyinfluenced forms and perceptions. Modernism’s early focus on trans-parency gave way to more subtle experiments in optical and cognitivereflection, a process brilliantly deployed by the artist James Carpenterand architects like Smith-Miller + Hawkinson. In a world obsessed withillusory images, the attention to precise textures and details in theCorning Museum of Glass (1995–7) in Corning, New York, renewed apassion for substance. Equally eloquent advocates took up inexpensiverecycled debris. Fernau & Hartman explored the distinctive patinas andhistorical resonance of reused timber with several remarkable houses innorthern California and beyond. Rick Joy juxtaposed rammed earth andrusted steel in simple cubic forms, a combination chosen for sustainabilityas well as sensuality. Others used recycled metal and plastic with aplomb,while several architects developed a fetish for shipping containers, aningenious but scarcely empathetic solution to the housing crisis.

2 3 7 D i s j u n c t u r e s a n d A l t e r n a t i ve s , 1 9 8 5 t o t h e P r e s e n t

Beset by deep-rooted American anxieties about bilingualism,architects have had to negotiate between competing verbal and visuallanguages while surreptitiously borrowing from each other. Neo-avant-garde discourse continues to call for aggressive transgressionsand defamiliarization. Philip Johnson, still a king-maker at 82, and co-curator Mark Wigley created a trendy new label with moma’sDeconstructivist Architecture show (1988), fusing the skewed shapes ofRussian Constructivism with the language games of Jacques Derrida’sDeconstruction.6 Apart from Gehry, the architects on display had littleor no built work, but their drawings and models had extraordinarypower, especially the pulsing energy of Zaha Hadid, the torqued geome-tries of Bernard Tschumi and the catastrophic scenarios of DanielLibeskind. The catalogue praised these works as subversive assaults onthe status quo, ‘releasing’ the ‘instability’ and ‘impurity’ that the ModernMovement had sought to repress. These references to revolutionarychange suggested a spread from a fashion magazine more than a politi-cal manifesto. Indeed, in less than a decade the avant-garde moved on toDeleuzian folds, then allusions to mathematics with fractals and chaostheory, followed by biomorphic curves and genetic mutations. Analogiesseem to metamorphose just as critics begin to probe them.

Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, CorningMuseum of Glass,Corning, New York,1995–7, entry.

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Another group rejected alienation by evoking the local, the everydayand the vernacular.7 The Vernacular Architecture Forum, founded in 1980,promoted scholarship about ‘ordinary’ American buildings and culturallandscapes, past and present, not just rural but urban and suburban, too.Vernacular, originally a linguistic term for parochial dialects about every-day matters (a contrast to the Latin of scholars and the Church), nowmeant designs attuned to local landscapes and construction traditions.8

Some aficionados espoused a romantic primitivism, a pathway to suppos-edly ‘authentic’ building practices and stable communities in perfectharmony with their surroundings. Others claimed that identity-baseddesigns distilled and honoured the equally spurious ‘authentic’ nature ofethnic or racial groups.9 Such essentialist aspirations served diverse pur-poses. In Miami, for example, Overtown Mall (1994) substituted formalexpressions of African roots for the displaced African-Americans’ rights ofurban citizenship, while the Caribbean Marketplace (1997) in Little Haititried to promote local entrepreneurs, albeit unsuccessfully.

Staunch modernists often lump all such allusions together and dis-miss the lot as unthinking imitations of inert traditions, repudiations ofmodern progress and dangerous right-wing populism. That caricatureshould not go unchallenged. True, romantic nationalists have longembraced vernaculars as ties to a Heimat, or homeland, but this doesnot signal a necessary correlation. Both critics and advocates of vernac-ular architecture are also mistaken about an unselfconscious, ‘timeless’quality since traditions are continually evolving, often through theagency of individuals. In fact, architectural culture is a rarefied exampleof this very phenomenon. Resonant modern forms have emerged inresponse to specific site conditions and cultural milieux. In both the pastand the present, this has been the work of skilled artisans and profes-sional architects. The discussion needs to move beyond essentialistpolemics about one’s own or other cultures, asking instead how alldesigners can gain meaningful knowledge about the continuities andconflicts that affect people and places.

As environmental concerns grew stronger, they generated two distinctidioms. Distress about irreparable damage to landscapes and increasedhomogeneity throughout the world renewed a yearning for connectionto ‘place’. A new term, ‘critical regionalism’, questioned superficial post-modern efforts to assuage such longings. Liane Lefaivre and AlexanderTzonis coined the phrase in 1981 in reference to post-World War TwoGreek architecture. For them, critical regionalism meant a ‘self-reflective’,locally inflected modern idiom that reveals the ecological and historicalparticularities of a specific site while simultaneously seeking to improveconditions. Kenneth Frampton brought the term into widespread use


with a 1983 article, ‘Toward a Critical Regionalism’, a polemic that fusedprofound despair about human and ecological destructiveness under latecapitalism with a deep commitment to the legacy of the ModernMovement. Citing Paul Ricoeur’s challenge regarding ‘how to becomemodern and to return to sources’, Frampton’s dialectical critiqueaddressed dehumanization in the modern world while refusing facileevocations of harmony.10 He gave little attention to cultural specifics,whether human or environmental, because of an unrelenting suspicionof any ‘scenographic’ reference as potentially kitsch. Instead, he urgedarchitects to show ‘resistance’ with highly abstract, indirect references totectonic traditions, local light and topographies.11

In contrast, ecologically minded architects used highly technical lan-guage to speak about effects, not just intentions, although they wereequally concerned with moral issues. William McDonough first voicedconcerns about the toxicity of materials and working conditions inmajor commercial facilities in the mid-1980s, a condition soon knownas ‘sick building syndrome’. The Environmental Protection Agencydemanded extensive environmental-impact statements for large-scaleprojects. A 1985 court ruling ended a decade of grandiose plans for NewYork’s Westway – an underground highway on Manhattan’s West Sidewith 80 hectares of parks and commercial development on new landfill– largely because such evidence had been suppressed. Pliny Fisk and GailVittori founded the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systemsnear Laredo, Texas, in 1987, to study the local impact of high- and low-tech construction materials in different parts of the world. Afundamental question now arose: was any construction justifiable whenbuildings consume half the world’s energy? The somewhat elusive term‘sustainable development’ signalled a new ambition: ‘zero-impact’buildings that generate more energy than they consume.

Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles sponsored environmental initia-tives. Green roofs, greenways and reclaimed brownfield sites becamemore common. The 1992 Public Art Master Plan for Phoenix, Arizona,coordinated interventions for the metropolis and its environs, directingdevelopment while protecting fragile landscapes. William Morrish andthe late Catherine Brown generated more than 40 collaborative teams ofarchitects, artists, engineers and landscape architects for projects rang-ing from highway underpasses and downtown cultural institutions to asolid-waste treatment plant on the periphery. A 1997 conference estab-lished the concept of Landscape Urbanism, which emphasizes long-termprocesses, a larger scale of connected interventions and collaborationacross disciplines. Major architects soon entered competitions for left-over or abandoned terrains vagues in and around cities – Fresh Kills on

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Staten Island (the country’s largest landfill), Seattle’s Olympic SculpturePark, New York’s High Line – stimulating debate about linkages betweenecological and artistic practices.

Yet investment in public infrastructure remains piecemeal at best, apoint made brutally clear with the 2005 disaster of Hurricane Katrinaand other recent catastrophes. Lax federal regulations allow the mostegregious industrial polluters to proceed virtually unchecked. Economicgrowth still trumps all other considerations, factored in terms of corpo-rate profits with little concern for ecologies, including the social andeconomic sustainability of local communities. Most environmentalistefforts are individual structures built for dedicated clients. Recognizinga potential in competition, the aia and construction-industry leadersfounded the us Green Building Council in 1993, then established volun-tary goals called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design(leed) in 2000. These performance-based assessments encourage ongo-ing innovation from architects and developers, who can receivecertification. Many companies, municipalities and federal agencies havealready instituted leed guidelines. American modern architecture hasturned green – reminding us once again that architects are responsibleonly for 10 per cent of what gets built.

Sterling McMurrin,architect, with LinneaGlatt and MichaelSinger, artists, andBlack & Veatch, engineers, 27thAvenue Solid WasteTreatment Facility,Phoenix, Arizona,1993.


Re-engineering Workspaces

The tumultuous economic shifts of the 1980s and ’90s saw workplaceschange along two different trajectories. One route pursued a lean, cost-effective model with plain façades, large floor plates and genericenvironments, typically called ‘exit-strategy’ architecture because it iseasy to reconfigure if an owner sells off a building. ‘Value engineering’supposedly prioritized various concerns, but often degenerated intocost-cutting and fast-track design processes. The results were prosaic,but this approach forced designers and managers to think in terms ofadaptive systems rather than expensive packaging. A parallel pathwaydrew businesses eager to attract ‘creative’ employees and wealthy clients.The Corporate Design Foundation, established in 1985, encouraged for-ward-looking ceos to ‘re-engineer’ architecture as well as management.Consultants emphasized that design could help build cohesion, collabo-ration and innovation among employees while strengthening companyvisibility in the marketplace. Preferences gradually shifted from shinypostmodern veneers towards a more idiosyncratic and dynamic, evenrough-edged industrial aesthetic.

The two tracks, generic and customized, began to overlap as imagi-native architects drew on inexpensive, standardized, flexible buildingtypologies. Business Week and Architectural Record inaugurated theannual bw/ar awards programme in 1997, hailing aesthetic quality andemployee satisfaction in the best new workplaces. Awards have gone tomuseums (the Corning Museum of Glass), scientific laboratories, man-ufacturing facilities, office buildings and non-profit facilities such as theSmith Group’s 2001 Merrill Education Center for the Chesapeake BayFoundation in Annapolis, Maryland, which also received the first plat-inum leed rating for its graceful façade of galvanized siding made fromrecycled cars and cans.

Location proved relevant in every field. New office buildings wereincreasingly concentrated in ‘edge cities’, outlying metropolitan areaswhere land was relatively inexpensive, regulations few, and architecturemostly tedious.12 When the first stage of ibm’s Solana campus opened in1989, not far from Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, a Progressive Architecturecover story lauded the ‘bold experiment’. The Mexican architect RicardoLegorreta was principal designer for the 365-hectare site (another 400hectares were held in a land trust), with Mitchell/Giurgula and BartonMyers for sub-sections. Legorreta created a corporate realm of réel mar-avilloso, or Magic Realism. The enchanted setting begins at the highwayinterchange, where motorists encounter a gigantic magenta pylon and twored walls that mark the entry court. The landscape architects Peter Walker

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and Martha Schwartz created environments that are at once indigenousand surreal. Even the parking garages are flanked by spacious ‘outdoorrooms’. White limestone edges unify the diverse, brightly hued pieces.

The sensibilities of Luis Barragán, Legorreta’s teacher, pervade theibm complex, such that adjacent communities protested the colours forlooking too conspicuously Mexican, which disturbed the cultural hier-archy of Anglo-Texans. Of course, Solana is not really multicultural, noteven a village – despite the Village Center – but a site in the multi-national economy. As one critic observed, the scenography, tightsecurity and lack of street life make this a place of ‘aching loneliness,reminding the visitor more of de Chirico than of Barragán’.13 Gooddesign prevailed, but it could not trump the global economic downturnthat beset edge cities in the early 1990s. ibm was forced to downsize itsworkforce and sub-let large parts of the complex.

The 1985 Mast Advertising and Publishing Headquarters in suburbanKansas City by bnim (then called pbni) was one of the first American

LegorretaArquitectos withPeter Walker/MarthaSchwartz, Solana IBM

Westland, near Dallas,Texas, 1988–90.


office buildings to emphasize energy conservation, natural light andcross-ventilation, together with a narrow footprint and terraced land-scaping to preserve a former farm on the site. It also signalled the risinginfluence of media, advertising, communication and arts-related busi-nesses, which came to be called ‘new media’. This shift affected thepersonal-computer industry, previously bound to a self-consciouslyundistinguished ‘garage’ aesthetic. Studios Architecture, a San Franciscointeriors firm, used colourful theatrical effects to produce a lively asym-metrical facility for Apple Computers in 1986, followed by a jaunty newheadquarters for Silicon Graphics in 1994.

If Silicon Valley and its offshoots were concentrated in suburbanlocales, communities of innovation will always thrive in cities, leadingdevelopers to envision concentrated ‘incubators’ in this fast-growingfield. The flashiest and best-known new media offices were in the LosAngeles area, where Franklin Israel and Frank Gehry redefined thenature of custom design to favour improvisation and montage, simulta-neously practical and fanciful, stable and fleeting. Eric Owen Moss andthe developer Frederick Smith joined forces to generate a series of eye-catching spectacles in the former industrial district of Culver City.Moss’s architectural cadenzas begin with old warehouse structures, thentwist and distort them in fearless amalgamations that celebrate clever-ness, sometimes obtrusively so. More established businesses also wantedcomputer-based interactive environments that generated new kinds ofarchitectural commissions. Asymptote’s Virtual New York Stock Exchange(1999) is a real-time setting where 3-d settings visualize the convolutedflow of data in multiple financial sectors.

Social interaction and personal comforts became crucial assets in thenew media. Flexible open spaces downplayed hierarchies and encour-aged informal collaboration. The inevitable disorder of productiveintensity no longer had to be concealed. Internal spines with powernodes provided state-of-the-art technologies, easily updated or repaired,allowing employees to hook up or disengage connecting stations as theywished. Even large businesses took down interior walls, which intensi-fied the need for orientation and differentiation. Virtual work forceswere a brief fad until managers realized that human contact spurs cre-ative energy. Jaunty coffee bars and lunch-rooms proliferated, as didrecreation areas, both indoor and outdoor, even on sets for tv sit-coms.The new workplace may be based on intangibles, but spaces for ‘seriousplay’ have become a necessity. They also provide a mask for higher-orderTaylorism, encouraging total commitment around the clock from mid-level knowledge workers whose real wages have declined as their jobshave become increasingly precarious.14

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Collaborative research efforts like biotechnology and neuroscienceturned scientific laboratories into big business in the 1980s. High-qualitymodern architecture became an amenity for private companies and uni-versity labs that vied for the best scientists and lucrative federal grants.Signature architects were a premium, usually restricted to façades andsocial areas, while specialized firms oversaw the highly technical interiors.Given estimates that 80 per cent of scientific breakthroughs come throughcasual interaction, informal meeting places and circulation pathwaysbecame crucial elements.15 Architects debated the nature of representationand effect. Were Venturi and Scott Brown too cautious with their woodsy,light-filled settings? Did Gehry try too hard to capture quirky, collidingunpredictability? Scientists consistently asked for flexibility, recognizingthat even a bright, ecologically sound appearance can downplay difficul-ties in gauging what is truly safe and effective.16 Hospital design began tochange as well, with increased competition for prominent doctors, munif-icent donors and short-term patients with generous insurance coverage.While technological prowess defined surgeries and diagnostic services,‘the new residentialism’ prevailed elsewhere. Hospital lobbies and corri-dors emulated shopping malls, directly evoking the consumer-baseddisparities in the nation’s healthcare.

Commissions for infrastructure generated some of the most inventivearchitecture of the era.17 The machine-based aesthetic of the earlyModern Movement softened considerably, accepting the irregularities of

Asymptote: HaniRashid and Lise AnneCouture, Virtual NewYork Stock Exchange,1999.


nature, the coexistence of historic buildings,even a discrete ornamentalism. Definitionsof function expanded to encompass publicawareness or increased protection from toxicwaste and noise pollution within and aroundthese facilities. Buildings were visibly embed-ded in their natural and human landscapes,whether powerhouses in Appalachia, water-filtration plants in the West or sludge-de-watering plants in New York, all reminiscent ofNew Deal installations. Holt Hinshaw Jones’sChiller-Cogeneration Plant for the Universityof California at Los Angeles (1994) quicklybecame an icon, not just a high-tech trope butthe real thing. Wes Jones was an articulate

advocate, calling the plant a ‘boss object’ that revealed the ‘provisionalityof American reality’.18 Andrea Leers’s and Jane Weinzapfel’s Modular viiChiller Plant (2001) provides a more lyrical message as a gateway to theUniversity of Pennsylvania, winning a bw/ar award. Nestled in a field ofgreen, its smooth elliptical façade of specially perforated sheet-metal isvariously transparent, translucent or invisible behind the cloud of mistit generates.

Interactive interiorspaces at Modemagazine from thetelevision show ‘Ugly Betty’, 2007.

Holt Hinshaw Jones,architects, with RalphM. Parsons, Inc.,engineer, Chiller-Cogeneration Plant,UCLA, Los Angeles,1992–4.

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Transportation facilities again became significant architecture, firsthigh-powered international services, then regional public transit. HelmutJahn’s United Airlines terminal at the company’s Chicago hub (1987)swells skyward at ground level, filling the space with light, while an under-ground passageway between the two concourses surprises passengers withbacklit glass walls and a neon sculpture overhead, pulsating in tandemwith computer-generated music. The roofs at Denver’s new airport byFentress Bradburn Architects (1989–95) are Teflon-coated fibreglass mem-branes, capable of withstanding snow and wind deflections while allowingfor easy expansion. Even parking facilities became positive fixtures in thelandscape, equipped with mesh screens to shade cars and, eventually,solar-panel umbrellas to generate energy while minimizing heat build-up.Architects soon helped encourage more ecological avenues of humanmovement. Light-rail transit stations in Los Angeles and Minneapolispromote public transportation, as do new ferry terminals in New York,integrated with the immediate human and environmental surroundings,to emphasize variations within a larger system.

Considerable American manufacturing was outsourced abroad whilehealth and safety conditions declined in many us plants, yet someindustries used architecture to chart a more progressive path to profits.Small workshops balanced precision with respect most easily. CarlosJimenez’s Houston Fine Arts Press (1986) paid homage to the precisionof craft-based skills with subtle references to vernacular prototypes fromearly in the century: loft-like spaces, saw-tooth roofs with north-facingclerestories, cheap industrial materials like corrugated metal and expan-sive glass window-walls. Julie Snow’s several factories in the upperMidwest improved efficiency while promoting the employee’s role inmanagement. Her Short Run Production Company in Richmond,Wisconsin (1990), united light manufacturing and administration with-in a single cubic volume. A glass wall resolved acoustical problems, whilethe entry plaza continued the structural trusses of the interior to frameviews of the prairie landscape. Frank Gehry followed similar principleswith his Manufacturing and Distribution Facility for Herman Miller inthe Sierra foothills of Rocklin, California (1989), highlighting sensualmaterials and workers’ participation with an asymmetrical grouping ofsmall sheds around a rocky berm.

Some larger companies are now seizing the initiative. Boeing reorgan-ized its huge aircraft factories in Seattle to emphasize amenities for smallworking groups. William McDonough and Julie Bargman of d.i.r.t.Studio have undertaken the largest industrial-ecology project in theworld for Detroit’s Ford Motor Company, a $2 billion scheme to reclaimthe heavily polluted 600-hectare River Rouge site that Ford has occupied


for almost a century for an updated, modern factory. Cities and regionsare making similar efforts. Portland, Oregon initiated plans for a ‘21stCentury Urban Production District’ that combined preservation withnew light industries. The new Pittsburgh Technology Center is beingdeveloped on the site of former steel mills on the Monongahela River.

Commercial skyscraper design remained caught in a frenzied drivefor height and flamboyance. Chicago saw an embarrassing number ofgarish and derivative buildings that mimicked Art Deco or classicalmotifs. Multinational firms like som, kpf and Cesar Pelli followed themoney to Asia, which now dominated the competition for the tallestbuilding in the world. Since transnational influence always followsmultiple vectors, a handful of Americans took up the environmentaltechnologies that had defined European and Asian skyscrapers for sev-eral decades. Fox & Fowle’s Four Times Square (1999) in New York (nowthe Condé Nast Tower) provided the initial prototype, largely at thebehest of the developer, the Durst Corporation. Renzo Piano then col-laborated with Fox & Fowle to win the competition for the New YorkTimes Building (2000–07), an ethereal design whose triple-skin wallsmodulate sun, heat and fresh air. Americans seemed ready for new high-rise design typologies.

The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centerset the agenda back in disturbing ways. The redevelopment of GroundZero since 2001 has been a deplorable enterprise, cloaked in secrecy,beset by greed and political ambitions that overwhelmed all other con-siderations. Rebuilding focused principally on the developer recoupingall 185,000 square metres of prime office space from the Twin Towers,while Governor George Pataki insisted on undue speed, convinced thiswould make him a presidential contender. Unrelenting publicity aboutthe Freedom Tower substituted celebrity gossip for serious deliberationsabout meaning and quality. The process manipulated public emotions,but ignored alternative development possibilities. Daniel Libeskind’soverbearing design prevailed in a limited competition, despite its refer-ences to falling glass shards, in part because of patriotic flourishes.When the developer insisted on adding som’s David Childs as a designpartner, the series of changes reduced the twisted shape of the glassfaçades to a prosaic corporate design. Obsessive concerns about securi-ty then generated a twenty-storey concrete bulwark at the tower’s base.As politicians fan American paranoia by militarizing modern architec-ture, heavy-handed surveillance and restricted access are underminingthe principles of democratic freedoms.

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Housing First and Last

If Americans typically define their freedom in terms of their homes,the end of the twentieth century looked unsettling. The predilectionfor unique ‘statements’ precluded any consensus about iconic dwellingsfor the 1980s and ’90s. Increased size was the only constant, evidentin suburban ‘McMansions’ and luxury urban condos. Well-meaningpaeans to restraint such as The Not So Big House (1998) signalled frus-trated misgivings about the prevailing trend.19 Costs rocketedeverywhere, and soon 35 per cent of us households were paying morethan a third of their monthly incomes for housing, often overcrowdedand inadequate, an almost untenable expense for many families.20 Anexaggerated focus on home-ownership – which reached an all-timehigh of 67.7 per cent in 2000 – saw mortgage-lending practices increasefinancial risks for almost every class of Americans, soon posing a threatfor the national economy. Cities tilted towards extremes of prosperityand poverty. Homelessness increased to affect more than 2.5 millionAmericans in 2007. When critics warned of a housing crisis similar tothat after World War Two, Congress voted to repeal the goal stated inthe Preamble to the 1949 Housing Act – ‘a decent home and suitableliving environment for every American family’ – calling it unfeasible.The Bush administration disbanded most governmental programmes,claiming that private charities and faith-based groups provide the keyto American reform.

Architects DanielLibeskind and DavidChilds of SOM,Governor GeorgePataki, Speaker ofthe State AssemblySheldon Silver, anddeveloper Larry A.Silverstein look at the redesigned archi-tectural model for theFreedom Tower atGround Zero during apress conference atCipriani Wall Streeton 29 June 2005.


Architects were sincerely distressed by these problems, but they feltthwarted on all sides. Less than 5 per cent of new home-buyers have anydirect communication with a professional designer. (Fees for customresidences run up to fifteen times the cost of stock plans for the same-area house.)21 Conceptual frameworks did change, however, asmodernist assaults on domesticity disappeared with increased attentionto the environment and the experience of dwelling. The rich legacy oftwentieth-century housing experiments offered a counterpoint to nostalgic evocations of nineteenth-century stability.22 Mid-centuryModernism became especially popular: ‘organic’ mavericks such as FrankLloyd Wright, Bruce Goff and John Lautner; the rational explorations ofMies, the Case Study Houses and pre-fab designs; inexpensive popular-culture mainstays like garden apartments, dingbats, ranch houses andmodern suburbs.

Three basic themes or predilections stand out. The first is a renewedinterest in the human body that extends far beyond amenities for healthand fitness. The idea of equality now encompassed a recognition ofphysiological differences. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990challenged architects to design for equitable access, redefining the term‘universal housing’ to mean careful attention to fluid movement, simpleprocedures, flexible uses and tolerance for errors. Feminists reclaimedthe domestic realm as a site to negotiate the everyday practices ofmodernity, reasserting the pleasures of home while taking account ofdomestic labour and the need for connections to the world beyond thedwelling.23 Expanded notions of the family made some provisions forsingle people, single parents, the elderly and multi-generational house-holds. Rob Wellington Quigley’s appealing 202 Island Inn for elderlymen in San Diego (1992) changed perceptions of single-room-occu-pancy (sro) hotels. San Diego became a hotbed of such experimentation,including a collaborative ‘demonstration block’, a patchwork of diverseliving arrangements, incomes and buildings under the aegis of Ted Smith,and an ongoing sequence of improvements in Latino border towns byEstudio Teddy Cruz.

Second, a joyous materiality abounded in houses by the best-knownarchitects of the era: the incadescent surfaces of Steven Holl, the reso-nant delight of Mark Mack, the austere beauty of Antoine Predock, thedynamic swoops of Frank Gehry. Anne Fougeron reinvigorated themodernist palette with load-bearing channel glass. Architects juxta-posed industrial products with natural wood and stone, often harvestednearby, and warm metals like copper. Recycled wood, metal, plastic andother materials enriched the play of tangible and emotional qualities.James Cutler’s respect for concrete and his reverence for wood, whether

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Rob WellingtonQuigley, 202 IslandInn, San Diego,California, 1992.

James Cutler (nowCutler AndersonArchitects), WrightGuest House, The Highlands, Washington, 1987.

reused or new-cut, synthesized envir-onmentalist sensibilities with thespiritual approach to materials of histeacher, Louis Kahn. Minimalism nowengaged with materials in terms oftheir origins as well as ecological,phenomenological and psychologicaleffects.

Third, environmental concernsnow came to the fore. After decades ofbeing dismissed as self-righteous, with‘no edge, no buzz, no style’, sustain-ability finally gained cachet in the late1990s.24 Energy conservation, renewable

resources and minimal disruption to the landscape became designincentives rather than restrictions. (Of course, the supposed autonomyof isolated, digitally mediated, sustainable dwellings subverts many basicprinciples of ecology.) Regional Modernism thrived in demanding climates like the upper Midwest, the North-west coast and the South-west. The ‘Arizona School’ of Will Bruder, Rick Joy, Wendell Burnette,Marwan Al-Sayed and others fused modern technologies with multiplelegacies. Wright’s Taliesin, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Native Americanpueblos, and the adobe revival of the 1920s had all emphasized solar orientation, shading, cross-ventilation and recycled materials.

Architects also began to explore suburbia, a region they had longspurned. The Jones Studio’s Environmental Showcase Home for ArizonaPublic Service (aps) in a Phoenix suburb (1994) was recognized as thetop environmental project in North America. A demonstration and edu-cation project during its first three years, the design introduced andpublicized a wide range of strategies for sustainability.

The popular media emphasized these themes in renewing an activepromotion of modern houses. When Dwell magazine hit the stands in2000, a hip young audience eager for simple, stylish design discoveredingenious work by architects much like themselves. Dwell juxtaposescontemporary design by ‘Nice Modernists’ with mid-century precedents,updating themes such as customized pre-fab houses, collaborations withproducers, low-income housing and unusual ‘Off the Grid’ projects.‘The best modern architecture’, contends editor Sam Grawe, ‘respondsthrough design, research, programming, and technology to the manydemands of the modern world.’25

Another media phenomenon emerged almost simultaneously in 2001.The Houses at Sagaponac provided an idyllic beachfront escape in the

Jones Studio, APS

EnvironmentalShowcase Home,Phoenix, Arizona,1994.

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Hamptons for über-wealthy New Yorkers. The developer Harry (Coco)Brown marketed this prestigious community as an alternative to theextravagant and nostalgic luxury homes nearby. His latter-dayWeissenhofsiedlung is a 25-hectare site with 37 houses by an internationalall-star team of modern architects selected by Richard Meier, with namesthat range from Steven Holl to Sam Mockbee and Hodgetts + Fung.Sagaponac may demonstrate the impressive diversity of modern idioms,but only eight houses have been completed. The claim of ‘livable andaffordable’ models – initially $2 million, now $7 million and up – pre-sumes great wealth as a norm.26 Yet the site plan is banal given the focuson individual buildings. In the end this is just another subdivision,geared to narcissistic fantasies about autonomy without any larger vision.

New Urbanism is a distant relation of contemporary modern archi-tecture, not its antithesis. The success of Duany/Plater-Zyberk’s Floridaresort town of Seaside (1982) launched the movement, which also drewon 1970s typological design studies by French and Italian neo-rational-ists. Proponents soon adopted cad technologies in their efforts to achievegreater density, social and environmental sustainability – and a databaseof historical typologies, The Congress for New Urbanism (cnu) beganin 1993, a conscious play on the staunchly modernist ciam. An officialLexicon recoded modernist words like project, block and master-plan,giving them neo-traditional intonations. Andrés Duany and ElizabethPlater-Zyberk contend that historicist motifs are merely expedient, away to build support for their alternative models of land use, althoughmost of their cohorts demonize all forms of Modernism as inherentlyinhumane. In principle, New Urbanist architects want sustainable,mixed-income developments in cities and suburbs, but good intentionsdo not in themselves make for progress. Most developers adopt only theplatitudinous imagery, foregoing any progressive aspirations.

Some advocates concede a dissonance between the ambitious NewUrbanist agenda and the rigidly prescribed codes of a retro-styled archi-tecture. Peter Calthorpe concentrates on a regional scale with retrofitsfor existing cities, suburbs, abandoned malls and industrial brownfieldsites such as the former airport at Stapleton, Colorado – an approachsometimes called Smart Growth. Housing activists like Joan Goody,Daniel Solomon, Michael Pyatok and Jacquelin Robertson endorse thebasic principles of New Urbanism while resisting its inflexible designrules, drawing instead on their personal observations and those of resi-dents who evaluate programmatic and formal alternatives. A few privatedevelopers have hired modern architects to enliven façades in NewUrbanist subdivisions like Prospect, Colorado, signalling positive atti-tudes about diversity and change. Given a shared critique of standard


development practices, other modernists would do well to take up someof New Urbanism’s goals and strategies, rather than dismissing every-thing about it.27

Economic and environmental pressures fuelled markets for multi-unit housing where innovations cross-fertilized, generating strongerhybrids. Cities from Atlanta to Portland encouraged Smart Growthwith higher-density housing, including upper-level additions to exist-ing structures. A variety of green features were introduced. Terraces androof gardens shared glimpses of nature with passers-by. Glass became anew residential vernacular material. New York saw a bevy of luxurybuildings by famous architects promising ‘iconic’ status with sleekcurves, undulating façades and pristine modern boxes, not least aposthumous Urban Glass House by Philip Johnson (2002–06). The fadfor converting urban warehouses into loft spaces accelerated across theus and around the world. Developers flooded the market with shoddy,overpriced loft-style buildings throughout the early 1990s, oftenmanipulating legislation designed to provide or protect live/workspaces for artists. A counter-move to raise standards then took hold,epitomized by Stanley Saitowitz’s 200-unit Yerba Buena Lofts in SanFrancisco, completed in 2001. This block relates intimately to its sur-roundings, a warehouse district south of Market Street where concreteand glass seem entirely appropriate, especially with the rhythmic com-position of setbacks.

The surge in luxury dwellings reduced the supply of moderate-costbuildings and inflated prices in all sectors, spurring a nationwide call for‘affordable housing’. Progressive Architecture devoted a special issue tothe subject in 1988 and then sponsored a competition, one of many

Studio Completivafor developer KikiSmith, ProspectTownhomes,Longmont, Colorado,2000.

Stanley SaitowitzArchitects, YerbaBuena Lofts, SanFrancisco. 1999–2001,street façade.

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around the country. Non-profit organizations funded local Americanprojects alongside international relief efforts.28 The Housing Act of 1990focused on special groups such as the elderly, the disabled and peoplewith aids. Several cities set up programmes to protect and expand thestock of moderate-priced dwellings, but could not keep up with theneed. The stylistic bent was conspicuously historicist, as if familiaritycould alleviate neighbours’ tendency to cry ‘nimby’ (Not in My Backyard),driven by fears about their own financial and social instability. But styleis not the main issue. Modernism entails all sorts of alternatives toconventional practices, not just formal idioms but programmes, siteplans, even clientele. The MacArthur Foundation committed $100 mil-lion to housing programmes, mostly to planners and communityorganizations, while architects struggled to break out of a tendency tosee invention solely in terms of formal pyrotechnics or unprecedentedtechnologies.

Some individuals and firms seized the initiative with singular testi-monies to resourceful, exuberant design. Sam Mockbee brought the firstgroup of Auburn University architecture students to an impoverishedAfrican-American settlement in Hale County, Alabama, in 1994, found-ing Rural Studio. His method begins with a close analysis of eachfamily’s specific problems and potentials, then seeks an inspiring poetryin the resolution. The houses cost a maximum of $20,000, revealing sur-prising beauty in cheap, recycled materials like car windscreens andstraw bales, together with unexpected imaginaries. Rural Studio stillthrives despite Mockbee’s early death in 2001. An inspiring and singularaccomplishment, it sometimes serves as a collective conscience orsanctified ideal. Due respect for Mockbee and his legacy would alsoencourage other designers who are creating their own small miracles inmyriad circumstances.

The architects of contemporary modern housing are mostly radicalincrementalists. Aesthetic verve helps bring small, but significantchanges in the existing order. Michael Bell initiated Sixteen Houses inHouston in 1996, collaborating with various experts, including commu-nity activists in the impoverished African-American Fifth Ward. Heasked sixteen architects to design prototypes compliant with federalhome-ownership voucher standards, then put the work on display at alocal museum. The extensive publicity raised funds to build new homesand provide job training, fending off displacement in one embattledneighbourhood.

Several firms use expensive commissions to underwrite ongoingprojects in the public sector. Koning Eizenberg of Santa Monica,California, explores conjoined terrains of modernity, fusing professional

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rigour with delightful surprises, local vernacular forms with a strongindustrial aesthetic. Their assemblages, while adamantly modern, connectwith people almost viscerally, simultaneously familiar and unpredictable.The designs emphasize the crucial role of site plans, as with the zigzagcourtyards of Harold Way, which maximize internal and external viewswhile encouraging serendipitous pleasures. Such architects infuse low-budget projects with the verve of urban vitality and the ‘simple joy ofliving’, principles too easily forgotten.29

A rather surprising ally is a new breed of developer that emerged inthe 1990s. Some are committed to modern design or to green architec-ture. Inclusionary zoning entices others with tax benefits for addingbelow-market-rate units. Architect-developers have negotiated success-es that might otherwise have remained stillborn. Community designcentres reclaimed their activist role, while new non-profit groups usedinnovative architectural tactics to address problems and rally support.Rosanne Haggerty’s Common Ground Community, founded in 1991and now the nation’s largest provider of supportive housing, tackleshomelessness for specific populations. Potential residents vet the pro-posals, adding their knowledge to that of other experts. Recent projectsinclude the award-winning Schermerhorn House in downtownBrooklyn (2007) for Actors’ Equity, designed by the PolshekPartnership, and a renovated flophouse on the Bowery in Manhattan.The Chicago Community Development Corporation, founded in 1988,has acquired more than 2,000 subsidized units, protecting the tenants

Rural Studio/SamMockbee, Harris(Butterfly) House,Mason’s Bend,Alabama, 1997.


while modernizing the buildings with bravura and adding market-rateexpansions. Stanley Tigerman and Helmut Jahn have recently complet-ed sro shelters with social services, green roofs, gardens, wind turbinesand solar panels. Livable Places in Los Angeles focuses on green afford-able housing on difficult sites. Their first project is Colorado Court by Pugh + Scarpa, an sro hotel in Santa Monica. It combines familiar climatic adaptations like breezeways and awnings with state-of-the artphotovoltaic panels in dazzling cobalt blue on the façade. These groups may exercise relatively little power in comparison with majordevelopers, but they are having a palpable effect on architecture, neigh-bourhoods and human lives.

Pugh + Scarpa forLivable Places,Colorado Court,Santa Monica,California, 2005–6.


Koning EizenbergArchitects, HaroldWay, Santa Monica,California, 2000–03.

Reclaiming the Public Sphere

Good housing entails far more than dwelling units, especially for thosewho cannot purchase the support services and safe, congenial socialspaces everyone needs. Since the mid-1980s architects like KoningEizenberg have built gymnasiums, elderly and childcare centres, andother community services, an approach that harks back to New Dealprojects. Michael Pyatok emphasizes the need for micro-businesses aspart of low-income dwellings. He allocates spaces inside and around theunits where residents can set up places for hairdressing, cooking, appli-ance repairs or other jobs. This shift in the typical residentialprogramme is a modern innovation that challenges traditional ideasabout the separation between work and home.

When David Burney, chief of design for the New York City PublicHousing Authority (nycha), discovered that almost half of nycha resi-dents were children or teenagers, he commissioned 104 new or renovatedcommunity centres, most keyed to gyms and computer facilities. Each oneis ingenious and extremely popular. The Melrose Community Center inthe Bronx (2001) is especially striking, with an elliptical gymnasium cladin gleaming aluminium panels and a rectangular building for classroomsthat features abundant glass. Disproving fears about vandalism, visibilityis an asset in these facilities. Architects, administrators and young peopleall get to perform in full view of their peers.30

Government has struggled to sustain a significant role in a culturethat now equates democracy with the freedom to buy what you want.Helmut Jahn’s virtuoso State of Illinois Center (1985) – today the JamesR. Thompson Center – inaugurated a strong populist attitude, eschew-ing the dignified monumentality that had long characterized suchinstitutions. The gigantic glass-and-steel cone is truncated and rakishlyoff-kilter, its façade covered with flashy pinstripes rising from a gaudycolonnaded base. Offices for 3,000 employees look out over an equallybrash rotunda suggestive of a Hyatt hotel, with two floors of commer-cial rentals at the base to maximize the flow of people. Even criticsadmired the vitality – but this is not the same as respect. Americanshave become increasingly distrustful of the modern state with itsinflated bureaucracies, conspicuous corruption, wasteful profligacyand increased surveillance. They often judge governmental architecturealong similar lines, wary of financial and rhetorical excess.Congressmen sometimes emulate this suspicious rectitude, hoping toappeal to taxpayers.

The situation changed when Edward A. Feiner became chief architectof the Government Service Administration (gsa) in 1996. Disturbed by

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‘K-Mart versions of mid-century Modern’, he created the DesignExcellence Program, commissioning significant architects, both youngand well-established, then pressing them to generate compelling reinter-pretations of American ideals and iconography for modern times.31

Those values include sustainability. All gsa projects after 2002 must rateat least silver on the leed scale. The major investment was $5 billion forfederal courthouses across the country, including the Sandra DayO’Connor Courthouse in Phoenix by Richard Meier & Partners, com-pleted in 2000, a magnificent glass structure that integrates shadingdevices and a resourceful evaporative system.32 Feiner also commis-sioned the nation’s first federal courthouse by an African-American (byRalph Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina) and the first federal build-ing by a woman (Carol Ross Barney’s Oklahoma City Federal Campus,a phoenix rising from the ruins of the building a right-wing extremisthad bombed in 1995).

The San Francisco Federal Building by Thom Mayne/Morphosis,commissioned in 1999 and completed in 2005, won kudos for its lithefaçade. The ‘living skin’ of perforated metal has operable windows and undulating ceilings to help channel fresh air, providing natural ventilation for 50 per cent of the office tower. The city’s planning depart-


Agrest/Gandelsonaswith Wank AdamsSlavin Associates,Melrose CommunityCenter, Bronx, NewYork, for the NewYork Public HousingAuthority, 2001.

ment would surely have rejected the design as lacking sensitivity to itscontext, but zoning regulations do not apply to federal buildings. Maynefought to make the plaza and an eleventh-floor ‘skygarden’ accessible toeveryone, downplaying the necessary security provisions as much aspossible. He treated the plaza’s bollards like random sculptural seats,defusing the siege mentality that pervades so much governmental archi-tecture. Definitions of freedom continue to evolve.

Smaller civic buildings are equally significant, albeit often stifledby pressures to idealize a mythic past or impose budgetary constraintsin the present. The Bainbridge Island City Hall near Seattle, by theMiller/Hull Partnership, reveals unexpected possibilities in seemingly

Murphy/Jahn, JamesR. Thompson Center,Chicago, 1981–5, atrium.

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restrictive conditions. Wood and sturdy industrial materials allude tothe island’s history as a major lumber town, while varied roof linesextend the public realm towards an inviting plaza to create an urbanfocus for today’s diverse residents. The project was completed in 2000,the same year that Mark Robbins, Director of Design Arts for the nea,established the New Public Works initiative to sponsor competitions forcreative civic buildings in other small towns, seeking to democratizedebate about architecture and the rights of citizenship.

That said, the ‘experience economy’ has dramatically altered thenature of the collective realm.33 Consumerism extends almost every-

Miller/Hull Partner-ship, BainbridgeIsland City Hall,Bainbridge Island,Washington, 2000.


where, not just to shopping malls and big-box retail but to historic sites,universities, sports venues, museums and other forms of urban enter-tainment. Jon Jerde emerged as the most agile manipulator ofhyper-commodified urban culture with Horton Plaza, a four-blockmixed-use redevelopment project in downtown San Diego alongside arestored Victorian enclave called the Gas Light District. Completed in1985, it immediately became a tourist ‘destination’. Jerde’s office thrivedwith a formula he called ‘experiential design’, based on multi-levelmovement through dynamic diagonal compositions of trendy frag-ments, historical and contemporary, with surprises carefully calculatedto multiply incentives to shop. Market-driven ‘postmodern urbanism’

Jon Jerde, HortonPlaza, San Diego,1984–5.

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emphasizes set pieces, supposedly vibrant affirmations of a locale, but infact disconnected from the immediate surroundings and larger city. Thecarefully programmed sites and events of urban ‘revitalization’ nowdraw multimedia and information-technology sponsors, a trend thathas generated ever more enticing and expensive spaces of consumption.

Modern civic life occurs in all kinds of settings that bring citizenstogether. As tourism transformed cities into museums, museumsbecame extravaganzas. Peter Eisenman won his first large-scale commis-sion with the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University inColumbus (1983–9). The composition’s myriad grids, with their refer-ences to the city’s Jeffersonian grid; the original campus plan; Terragni’sCasa del Fascio; drawings by Sol Lewitt; faa flight maps above the site;geological fault lines below it; and other sources created an intriguingcaged overlay on the exterior and rather jarring galleries inside.Eisenman views design as a formal game in which he invents and con-trols elaborate rules. When the disorienting interior spaces frustratedartists, curators and viewers alike, he contended that such distress was a

Eisenman RobertsonArchitects, WexnerCenter for the Arts,Ohio State University,Columbus, 1983–9.


purgative tonic; when leaks and major environmental-control problemsnecessitated a three-year closure for a complete makeover, he suggestedthat these failings were signs of great architecture. In any case, the cere-bral challenges stirred interest along with controversy. Eisenman’s careertook off, along with a spate of new publications and events to promotehis ideas and visibility.

Other kinds of museums flourished as well, typically seeking toinspire rather than disorient. The soaring glass structure of the PolshekPartnership’s National Investors’ Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio (1988–95)celebrated this city’s legacy as an incubator of innovations, reminding usthat American experiments have often occurred outside the mainstream.Polshek’s Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s AmericanMuseum of Natural History (1994–2000) combined Modernism withEnlightenment-era ideals of clarity and transparency in a immenselyappealing public institution.

The surge in new museums and performing-arts centres since the late1980s spurred architectural experimentation in trendy hotels, boutiquesand restaurants. But the leap in scale and expense required municipalfunds to supplement donations from local power elites who have alwaysoverseen American high culture. Higher costs required bigger crowds,who were drawn to blockbuster repertoires. The cultural complexessoon became theme parks for the arts with tight security, prestige con-dominiums and other developer formulas for mixed use.

The stunning success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum inBilbao, Spain, completed in 1997, saw cities everywhere try to replicate ‘theBilbao effect’, generating their own architectural icons in the hope of sim-ilar tourist pilgrimages. Content mattered less than the spectacle of thebuilding and the buzz. If Gehry himself took on a score of commissions,large and small, others also shared the glory. The swell of new high-pro-file museums is especially marked in Midwestern cities: Zaha Hadid’sRosenthal Center at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (2003);sanaa’s Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art (2006); DanielLibeskind’s Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum (2006); Herzog& de Meuron’s Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2007); and Steven Holl’sresplendent addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (2007).American modern architecture at the start of a new millennium is openlyglobal while proudly displaying its own diverse talents.

Of course, exciting artistic ‘events’ tend to happen outside institu-tionalized settings, so enterprising museum administrators organizedthese as well. Some are temporary venues, others rehabilitated buildingslike Dia:Beacon, or moma Queens and the nearby p.s.1, intended asinterim facilities but far more dynamic than the new moma by Yoshio

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Taniguchi, completed in 2006 (which doubled the area of the earliermuseum).

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio specialized in museum instal-lations that revealed, subverted and revelled in the seductive allure ofdisplay. As architects they created mutable environments that weretransformed in response to participants or to unpredictable conditions.The Blur Building for the Swiss expo 2002 exhibition, used hybrid tech-nological systems to recycle water from Lake Neuchâtel, creating afluctuating cloud of mist. The structure and its visitors literally disap-peared in an apparition that was simultaneously visible and invisible,precisely orchestrated and unpredictable in response to wind and otherfactors. Diller + Scofidio have now moved into more established archi-tectural terrains with the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston(2006) and a redesign for New York’s Lincoln Center (2006–09). Suchprojects still feed into an intensified consumption of images, ideas andplaces. Yet they give pause, pressing everyone to reflect, however briefly,on the systems within which we all perform.

Smaller museums provide a more nuanced alternative to grandiosecultural extravaganzas. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop designedseveral discreet masterpieces in the us. The first, the Menil Collection inHouston, completed in 1987, used simple facades and slightly asymmet-rical siting to mitigate its formality, enhancing the residential fabric ofsmall frame houses nearby. An innovative roof and ceiling provide dif-fused natural light, filtering the strong Texas sun, while the interior‘treasure chamber’ displays exquisite artworks in the context of ongoing

Diller + Scofidio, Blur Building, mediapavilion for SwissEXPO 2002, Lake Neuchâtel,Switzerland, 2002.


curatorial work. The American Folk Art Museum by Tod Williamsand Billie Tsien (2001) is an elegantly restrained presence in midtownManhattan. The main façade, set back from the street, consists of over-lapping folded planes in a white bronze alloy more commonly used forship propellers, a fitting paean to the ingenious creativity and materialdelights of handicraft aesthetics. Yet can any piece of architecture reallylive up to the Arup World Architecture Award of 2002, which ranked thisthe ‘Best Building in the World’?

Significant architecture helps us confront contentious topics. Huff +Gooden, an African-American firm based in Charleston, South Carolina,have designed a small museum for the Virginia Key Beach Park (2005–8)that underscores the ambiguities of racial pride and segregation. The sitewas a ‘coloured’ beach in the 195os, when any municipal services were acivil-rights victory. Historic photos laminated onto the glazing show theoverlapping realities of that past. The structure and the larger landscapeby Walter Hood continue the theme of multiplicities and changes overtime. The building is perched on stilts to avoid potential floodwaterand reveal trails that interweave human memories with environmentallegacies. This new sensibility in American modern architecture encour-ages visitors to contemplate multiple dimensions of the past and thefuture, buildings and their surroundings.

Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1989–2003)inaugurated a radical rethinking of the experience of art and music.Skilled designers realize that freedom encounters constraints in the chal-lenge of creating good acoustical design, especially for venues that mustshift dramatically in size and to accommodate the kinds of instrumentsbeing played. They are also aware of psycho-acoustics, the recognitionthat a hall’s visual characteristics might affect how audiences experiencemusic. Most challenging of all, they confront the need to assert excite-ment while somehow resisting the inescapable power of global market-ing. If architecture is a tool of global economic interests, can it also helphuman beings discover moments of respite?

The relationship between modesty and marketing affects even highereducation in today’s culture. The continuing construction boom atcolleges and universities features striking new gymnasiums, dormitories,cultural facilities and student centres. Donors are pleased with the visi-bility, while view-books for potential students promote the appeal ofcampus life. The University of Cincinnati may be the best known for itssignature buildings, part of a conscious effort to ‘rebrand’ the institu-tion.34 Stars seem worth the high fees if they bring the buzz of a bigname and a powerful visual presence to the campus. New buildingsembrace practicality and temporality as virtues, sometimes literally so.

Tod Williams + BillieTsien, American FolkArt Museum, NewYork City, 1999–2001.

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The response to Hodgetts + Fung’s Towell (the Temporary Powell) Libraryat ucla (1992), a vivacious conjunction of serendipitous fragments andoff-the-shelf industrial materials, was so positive that the temporarystructure has been preserved. The McCormick Tribune Campus Centerat iit by Rem Koolhaas/oma (2003), which embraces the elevated trainline, is likewise immensely popular.

A bevy of appealing small libraries appeared in the 1980s and ’90s,refuting projections that the Internet would make them obsolete. Manyjuxtaposed surprisingly diverse materials on their façades, evoking thelively patchwork of contemporary cultural life. The Seattle Public Libraryby Rem Koolhaas/oma (2004) carries this textural and experiential atti-tude throughout the building. Will Bruder’s Phoenix Central Library(1988–94) achieved an intense hyper-reality appropriate to the fastest-growing metropolitan region in the nation. Two fully glazed walls orientvisitors to the distant desert landscape, while views of the activities insideengage drivers on fast-paced Central Avenue. These façades are trans-formed in response to the intense Arizona sunlight, the southern wallwith computer-controlled slats and louvres, the northern one with angledTeflon ‘sails’. The entrance juxtaposes sinuous stone walls with inexpen-sive pre-cast concrete, which Bruder considers a ‘late-20th centuryvernacular material in the southwest’.35 Off-the-shelf componentsthroughout the interiors provide economy with a deft ‘ready-made’artistry. The Crystal Canyon at the centre rises the full height of thebuilding, its multi-faceted layers showing the workings of the structure,including transparent elevator shafts that make every floor enticinglyvisible. This is resonant public architecture, highlighting the beauties ofquotidian realities as well as those of a harsh yet enthralling locale.

Other public buildings achieve a serenity that is hard to come by inmodern cities. Steven Holl’s remarkable Chapel of St Ignatius at Seattle

Huff + Gooden, with Walter Hood,landscape architect,Virginia Key BeachPark, Miami, 2005–7,drawing.

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University (1994–7) drew from the sacred liturgy that unites a diversestudent body in an urban setting. Scarce economic resources led him toemphasize natural light and the tactile surfaces of inexpensive materials.Visitors proceed through a sequence of seven ‘bottles of light’, folds inthe ceiling illuminated by coloured reflectors and complementary glassprisms. The luminosity bathes the walls and the polished concrete floorin opaline splendour, simultaneously tangible and mystical. Even theconstruction process became a ritual with the 23 tilt-up concrete panelslifted into place, the holes from the crane left exposed, then capped withspecial bronze covers. This building is an emotional and educationalexperience, a fusing of industrial and hand-crafted materiality that inten-sifies spiritual awareness for everyone who encounters it.

Education remains a key modern value in American life, even thoughschool boards are being hit hard by tax cuts and social problems likefalling test scores, rising violence and student lethargy. Recent pedagog-ical theories emphasize different ways of learning and the importance of

Hodgetts + Fung,Towell (TemporaryPowell) Library, UCLA,Los Angeles, 1992.


Will BruderArchitects, PhoenixCentral Library,Phoenix, Arizona,1988–94, viewfrom Central Avenue.

Phoenix CentralLibrary, section.

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small groups, especially in large, anonymous schools. Thom Mayne ofMorphosis seized these issues in a creative manner with the DiamondRanch High School in exurban Pomona, California (1993–9), all thewhile staying within a constrained budget. Mayne was the surprise win-ner of a competition for this difficult, 30-hectare site, largely because hechose to preserve and work with the steep hills while other contendersproposed flattening them. The most dynamic element is an angular‘main street’ that unifies all the buildings and a student body of 2,000.

previous pageSteven Holl, St Ignatius Chapel,Seattle University,Seattle, Washington,1994–7, interior.

Thom Mayne/Morphosis, DiamondRanch High School,Pomona, California,1993–9, view of internal ‘street’.

Diamond Ranch HighSchool, view fromplaying fields.

Large, irregular openings offer surprising views, while niches cut intothe buildings provide opportunities for students and teachers to congre-gate, interact and watch each other. Three terraces correspond to‘campuses’ with smaller clusters of 300 students. A monumental stair-way embedded in the hillside doubles as an amphitheatre. The plantakes advantage of a natural bowl, integrating the playing fields into thesurrounding terrain.

Inventive small projects are often appealing because of the spiritedinteraction as buildings, sites and people adapt to ongoing changes.Architects have always taken up difficult challenges with ingenuity. Theimaginative public responses also offer welcome alternatives to a worldtoo often defined by glitz and excess. Today’s obsession with celebrityarchitects and lavish mega-projects instead promotes the values of real-estate developers and passive consumer-spectators. The prevailing focushas direct and indirect implications. Public money for grandiose muse-ums or stadiums diminishes funds for public education. Modern luxuryapartment-buildings may be striking, but the trend is depleting thestock of affordable housing in most cities. No matter how progressivethe design of individual buildings, environmental and infrastructureproblems require large-scale collective reforms. The incentive to addresssuch issues has declined in recent decades. The fact is that everyone – thearchitectural profession, governments, schools, the media and thepublic – must take account of these larger contexts.

The history of American modern architecture offers a useful per-spective at the start of the twenty-first century. Reflecting on theachievements and mistakes of the past provides a framework for judge-ment and imagination about the future. We have seen that innovationscan easily become narcissistic indulgences unless the advances build onprecedents and engage the tumultuous give-and-take of modern life. Inarchitecture, as in all things, life is the best criterion for judgement andthe ultimate source of inspiration.


This book has explored a matrix of external pressures and internalshifts in the history of modern American architecture. Both majorbuildings and some lesser-known surprises show definite configura-tions without cohering into formulas or essences. To think historicallyis to see myriad changes and alternative possibilities as well as broadpatterns. This does not entail nostalgia for an illusory past or limi-tations on present-day freedoms. The relative clarity of earliercircumstances makes it easier to discern such possibilities in the murkyconfusion of our own time, encouraging diversions from the usualpaths of passive acceptance or antagonistic opposition. That current ofthought runs throughout the lineage of American modern architecture,which has always opposed mindless historicism but not thoughtfullessons from the past.

Despite rhetoric about totally new circumstances, a familiar refrainfor over a century, today’s options are still conditioned in part by cultureand history. The themes and typologies of this book remain potent.Hybrid cross-fertilization generates new forms and ideas, some exhilarat-ing, others unsettling, whether intentionally so or not. Commercialvalues are certainly more powerful and omnipresent than ever. Architectscan respond by actively encouraging greater public access and enablingalternative values rather than merely capitulating to market forces.Industrial production continues to emphasize diversity and choice,which promotes unique opportunities but also heightens consumerism.New media have expanded access to ideas, information and opinions,often blurring critical distinctions between these categories.

Green architecture and site planning have at last become decisivethemes. No one can allege a choice about whether to engage with envi-ronmental issues, since we now recognize that all buildings haverepercussions. Seizing hold of these circumstances, architects and devel-opers are now generating energy-efficient designs that are visuallycompelling. Infrastructure services have again become a critical chal-lenge. As with other issues, architecture cannot solve environmental

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Epilogue

problems, but it inevitably worsens or improves conditions. The same istrue of social and economic issues.

The greatest legacy of American modern architecture may be its vari-ety – the mixture of audacity and subtlety, high art and popular culture,dominant trends and startling originality. This does not mean alloptions are equally good or feasible. There are significant variations inquality together with diverse standards and vantages from which toappraise. Artistic virtuosity may be a goal, though perhaps one that isover-emphasized. Surely the diffusion of social justice and aestheticquality are equally valid if rarely discussed values to consider. Environ-mental design may provide a lingua franca that transcends the divisionsof formal languages, budgets and locales. Since the criteria for apprais-ing ‘good’ architecture are never fixed, the challenge is to look as broadlyas possible while exercising judgement.

Modern architecture is still under attack on many fronts, whichsometimes encourages ongoing defensiveness. Many critics wronglyblame it for causing larger social problems that range from urban unrestto banal environments. Today’s modernists no longer claim the powerto transform the world, but they cannot abdicate all responsibility.Architects’ distinctive expertise is essential to public conversations abouthousing, work conditions and public life. Built environments do affecthow people live and how they feel about the world. Repercussions extendbeyond specific clients, although paeans to ‘the public’ tend to obscuredifferent preferences and unequal power.

Fortunately there are new opportunities to discuss both the past andthe future of modern architecture in the us and around the world. Therecent surge of museums has seen exhibits shift from celebrity spectaclesto thoughtful deliberations about issues like prefabrication, ecologies,infrastructure and amenities. Venues for deliberation continue toexpand along with enticing ideas. The aftermath of disasters like 9/11 andHurricane Katrina has brought a new seriousness. Architecture becamea way to imagine multiple prospects and ground debates about compet-ing meanings, goals and effects. These creative possibilities extendthroughout the discipline and far beyond its boundaries.

Modern architecture continues to evolve through continuities withthe past and distinctive contemporary innovations. Modernists are col-laborating with historic preservationists, aware of shared commitmentsin a world increasingly subservient to real estate interests. Health, safetyand maintenance have again come to the fore, alongside beauty and well-being. Caught in the inescapable web of global marketing, architecturecan also help human beings discover moments of respite and explorealternative possibilities.

2 7 7 E p i l o g u e

The twenty-first century will see new buildings that inspire andanger us, separately and collectively. New talents will emerge. Some willbe daring, their work brilliant and coruscating; others will seek to refineideas and extend quality beyond the exceedingly narrow populationthat now employs architects’ services. The most ingenious individualswill continue to embrace the actual conditions of American life whilepressing for improvement. The future needs a range of approaches andambitions.

Seen from this perspective, history reaches far beyond names, dates,stylistic labels and decoding games. It becomes a necessary frame orfoundation for even the most audacious choices and deliberations madein the present. Whatever the field of inquiry, historical awareness liber-ates rather than limits creative processes. After all, the us Patent Officerequires a statement about ‘Prior Art’ for any new invention. An under-standing of patterns from the past is a prerequisite for envisaging viablealternatives in psychoanalysis, the law, and all the sciences. This shouldbe the case for modern architecture and the communities we build. Inthat spirit I hope this book encourages readers to look anew at theworld around them, past and present, fascinating and disturbing, andthereby to imagine new possibilities.

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Abbreviations

aa American Architect

af Architectural Forum

ar Architectural Record

gr Grey Room

hb House Beautiful

jae Journal of Architectural Education

jaia Journal of the American Institute of Architects

jsah Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

pa Progressive Architecture

pp Pencil Points [became Progressive Architecture in 1944]

Introduction

1 Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (New York, 1930), p. 18. Also see Thomas

Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York, 2002).

2 See Jean-Louis Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the

American Challenge (Paris, 1995); Jeffrey Cody, Exporting American Architecture,

1870–2000 (London and New York, 2003).

3 William James, ‘What Pragmatism Means’, from Pragmatism (1907); reprinted in John

J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James (Chicago, 1977), p. 376. Also see James

T. Kloppenberg, ‘Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?’, Journal

of American History, lxxxiii (June 1996), pp. 100–138; Joan Ockman, ed., The Pragmatist

Imagination: Thinking about ‘Things in the Making’ (New York, 2000); Thomas Fisher,

‘Architecture and Pragmatism’, in In the Scheme of Things (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 123–32;

Mark Linder, ‘Architectural Theory is no Discipline’, in John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis

and Richard Burdett, eds, Strategies in Architectural Thinking (Chicago and Cambridge,

ma, 1992), pp. 167–79; John Rajchman, Constructions (Cambridge, ma, 1998).

4 Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Learning from Cultural History’, jsah, xliv (December 2005),

pp. 436–40. Also see Bruno Reichlin, ‘Controlling the Design Process: A Modernist

Obsession?’, Daidalos, lxxi (1999), pp. 6–21; Sarah Williams Goldhagen, ‘Something

to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style’, jsah, lxiv (Summer 2005), pp. 144–67.

5 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford

and New York, 2005). Also see Latour’s photographic essay with Emilie Hermant, Paris:

ville invisible (Paris, 1998).

6 See Tom Porter, Archispeak (London and New York, 2004); Adrian Forty, Words and

Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London, 2000); Raymond Williams,

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York and London, 1983); Tony

2 7 9

References

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Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, eds, New Keywords (Oxford and

Malden, ma, 2005).

7 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project’ (1980), in Hal Foster, ed., The

Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York, 1998), pp. 1–15; T. J. Clark,

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, 1999), pp. 2–3.

8 See Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving

Modernity, trans. C. L. Chiappari and S. L. López (Minneapolis, 1995); Gwendolyn

Wright, ‘On Modern Vernaculars’, in Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds., Everyday

America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (Berkeley, ca, 2003), pp. 163–77.

9 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space

(Cambridge, ma, 2001), p. 92.

chapter one: Modern Consolidation, 1865–1893

1 Charles and Mary Ritter Beard, Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1929).

2 E. A. Atkinson, ‘The Relative Strength and Weakness of Nations’, Address read before the

American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1886; reprinted in Henry Nash

Smith, ed., Popular Culture and Industrialism, 1865–1890 (New York, 1967), p. xiii.

3 John Root, ‘A Great Architectural Problem’, Inland Architect and News Record (June

1890); reprinted in Donald Hoffmann, ed., Meanings of Architecture: Buildings, and

Writings of John Root (New York, 1967), p. 141.

4 Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea [1924] (New York, 1956), p. 247.

5 William Conant, ‘Will New York Be the Final World Metropolis?’, Century, xxvi (1883);

Montgomery Schuyler, ‘Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument’, Harper’s Weekly, xvii (26 May

1883); reprinted in William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe, eds, American Architecture and

Other Writings by Montgomery Schuyler (Cambridge, ma, 1961), p. 173.

6 Sullivan, Autobiography, p. 285. Burnham and Root designed more than 200 buildings

in 18 years, McKim, Mead and White more than 940 in 30 years. See Kristen Schaffer,

Daniel Hudson Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner (New York, 2003).

7 The term ‘process space’ was first used in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, American Space:

The Centennial Years: 1865–1876 (New York, 1972), pp. 85–6.

8 Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

(Cambridge, ma, 1977), cited in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York, 2003), p. 60.

9 Matthew Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, ct, 1868), pp. 706, 26.

10 Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New

York, 2005), p. 93.

11 Rosemarie H. Bletter, ‘The Invention of the Skyscraper: Notes on Its Diverse Histories’,

Assemblage, ii (February 1987), pp. 110–17.

12 ‘A Great Commercial Edifice’, New York Sun, (4 November 1869), cited in Sarah Bradford

Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913 (New Haven,

1996), p. 71.

13 Gerald Larson and Roula Gerantiotis, ‘Toward a Better Understanding of the Evolution

of the Iron Skeleton Frame in Chicago’, jsah, xlvi (March 1987), pp. 39–48.

14 Colin Rowe, ‘Chicago Frame’ (1956), reprinted in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and

Other Essays (Cambridge, ma, 1976), pp. 100–101.

15 Montgomery Schuyler, ‘Modern Architecture’, ar, iv (July–September 1894), reprinted in

Jordy and Coe, American Architecture, p. 78.

16 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition

(Cambridge, ma, 1941), pp. 368–95, 846. Phillip Johnson’s moma catalogue, Early Modern

Architecture in Chicago, 1870–1910 (New York, 1940), affirmed the idea of Chicago as

prophecy or ‘protomodernism’, as did Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture:

Romanticism and Reintegration [1929] (New York, 1993). For an insightful analysis, see

Robert Bruegmann, ‘Myth of the Chicago School’, in Charles Waldheim and Katerina

Rüedi Ray, eds, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Chicago, 2005),

pp. 15–29.

17 Peter Brooks, letter to Chicago Economist (8 June 1889), p. 477; Montgomery Schuyler,

‘D. H. Burnham and Co.’, ar, v (February 1896), p. 56; cited in Donald Hoffman,

The Architecture of John Wellborn Root (Chicago, 1973), pp. 155, 157, 161.

18 By 1890 women held 60 per cent of all typing and stenography jobs in the us; by 1900,

77 per cent; by 1920, 90 per cent.

19 Architect (8 December 1894), p. 895; Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern

Architecture [1976] (New York, 1977), p. 67; William H. Jordy, Progressive and Academic

Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972), p. 61; Giedion, Space, Time

and Architecture, p. 388; as cited in Joanna Merwood, ‘The Mechanization of Cladding:

The Reliance Building and Narratives of Modern Architecture’, gr, 04 (Summer 2004),

pp. 55, 60.

20 Louis H. Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, Lippincott’s (March

1896), reprinted in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (1918; reprinted New York,

1979), p. 202.

21 Louis Sullivan, letter to Claude Bragdon, 1903, and ‘The Tall Office Building’, cited in

William H. Jordy, ‘The Tall Buildings’, in Wim de Wit, ed., Louis Sullivan: The Function

of Ornament (New York, 1986), pp. 78, 203.

22 Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building’ and ‘Characteristics and Tendencies of American

Architecture’ (1885); reprinted in Kindergarten Chats, pp. 205, 208, 178.

23 Russell Sturgis, ‘The Warehouse and the Factory in Architecture’, ar, xv (January 1904),

p. 14; Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, ‘Recent Architecture in America, iii: Commercial

Buildings’, Century Magazine, xxvii (August 1884), p. 512; C. W. Westfall, ‘Buildings Serving

Commerce’, in John Zukowsky, Chicago Architecture, 1872–1922 (Munich, 1987),

pp. 77–89.

24 Frederick Law Olmsted, ‘Future of New York’, New York Daily Tribune (28 December

1879); cited in Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Ideal

(New York, 2002), p. 21; Industrial Chicago (Chicago, 1891), vol. i, p. 72.

25 On Riverside, see Walter Creese, The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great

Spaces and Their Buildings (Princeton, 1985), pp. 219–40.

26 See Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American

City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, ma, 1989); Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model

Home (Chicago, 1981); Joseph Biggott, From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the

Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1879–1929 (Chicago, 2001).

27 Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home [1869]

(New Brunswick, 2002), pp. 22, 24.

28 Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York, 1878), p. 19.

29 ‘Crazy-Quilt Architecture’, Scientific American, liii (25 July 1885); cited in Arthur

Schlesinger, Rise of the City, 1878–1898 (New York, 1933), p. 280.

30 Paul Sédille, ‘American Architecture from a French Standpoint’, American Architect and

Building News, xx (11 September 1886), pp. 122–4; cited in Jean-Louis Cohen, Scenes of

the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960 (Paris,

1995), p. 20.

31 Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style [1955] (New Haven, 1971).

2 8 1 R e f e r e n c e s

2 8 2

32 ‘A Revolution in Living’, New York Times (3 June 1878).

33 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Passing of the Home in Great American Cities’,

Cosmopolitan, xxxviii (December 1904), p. 138. Also see Gilman, Women and Economics

[1898] (New York, 1966); John Pickering Putnam, Architecture Under Nationalism

(Boston, ma, 1890); Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s

Early Apartments (Ithaca, ny, 1990).

34 See Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in

America (New York, 1996); Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential

Hotels in the United States (Berkeley, ca, 1994); Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in

New York (New York, 1990).

35 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 [1888] (New York, 1960), p. 207.

36 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism

(London, 1976), originally an essay (1928); cited in M. Christine Boyer, Manhattan

Manners: Architecture and Style, 1850–1900 (New York, 1985), p. 91. Also see Neil Harris,

‘Shopping – Chicago Style’, in Zukowsky, Chicago Architecture, pp. 137–55; Elaine S.

Abelson, When Ladies Go a’Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department

Store (New York, 1982); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a

New American Culture (New York, 1993).

37 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie [1900] (New York, 1961), p. 299.

38 New York Times, (26 June 1889); Mariana van Rensselaer, ‘Madison Square Garden’,

Century, xliv (March 1894); cited in Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David

Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York, 1999),

pp. 698, 705.

39 Joseph Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building (Chicago, 2002), p. 174. Also see Dankmar

Adler, ‘The Chicago Auditorium’, ar, i (April–June 1892), pp. 416–34.

40 Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, p. 325.

41 Montgomery Schuyler, ‘Last Words about the World’s Fair’, ar, iii (January–March

1894); reprinted in Jordy and Coe, American Architecture, pp. 290–91. Also see Neil

Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert and Robert Rydell, Grand Illusion: Chicago’s World’s

Fair of 1893 (Chicago, 1993); James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893

(Chicago, 1991); Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American

Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia, 1998).

chapter two: Progressive Architectures, 1893–1918

1 William Herbert [Herbert Croly], Houses for Town or Country (New York, 1903), p. 5;

idem, ‘The Contemporary Suburban Residence’, ar, xi (January 1902), p. 2; Herbert,

‘The New World and the New Art’, ar, xii (June 1902), p. 53; Herbert, ‘Civic

Improvements’, ar, xxi (May 1907), pp. 347–453.

2 Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909), p. 446. In 1913 Croly

became founding editor of New Republic. The next year he published Progressive

Democracy. See David Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of

an American Progressive (Princeton, 1985); Suzanne Stephens, ‘Architectural Criticism

in a Historical Context: The Case of Herbert Croly’, in Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, ed.,

The Architectural Historian in America (Washington, dc, 1990), pp. 275–87.

3 On progressivism, see James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and

Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York and Oxford,

1986); Robert Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American

Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York, 1982).

4 William James, ‘Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism’, in A Pluralistic Universe

(New York and London, 1909).

5 William James, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, in The Will to Believe [1897]

(Cambridge, ma, 1979), pp. 114–40; James, Essays in Radical Empiricism [1912]

(Cambridge, ma, 1976), p. 22.6 See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, ny, 1991);

Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford and Cambridge, ma, 1992).

7 Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (1905; reprinted Seattle, 1967), p. 7.

8 Marston Hartley, ‘The Importance of Being dada’ in Adventures in the Arts (New York,

1921); cited in Francis Naumann, Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York (New York,

1996), p. 17.

9 See Alan Trachtenberg’s essay in America and Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904–1940

(Millerton, ny, 1977). Hine’s Men at Work [1932] (New York, 1977) depicts the heroism of

skyscraper construction.

10. Randolph Bourne, ‘Trans-National America’ (1916) and ‘The Architect’ (1916); reprinted

in Olaf Hansen, ed., Randolph Bourne: The Radical Will, Selected Writings, 1911–1918

(Berkeley, ca, 1977), pp. 248–64, 279–81. On Bourne and other public intellectuals’

responses to the city, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life

in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York, 1987).

11 Randolph Bourne, ‘Pageantry and Social Art’ (n.d.), first published in The Radical Will,

p. 515.

12 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: us Industrial Building and European Modern

Architecture (Cambridge, ma, 1986), pp. 11, 68, 72.

13 Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika [1926] (New York, 1993), p. 45.

14 Cited in David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production: The

Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1984), p. 229;

Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological

Enthusiasm (New York, 1989), pp. 204–5.

15 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘In the Cause of Architecture’, ar, xxiii (March 1908), p. 166;

Wright, ‘The New Larkin Administration Building’, The Larkin Idea (November 1906);

cited in Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building: Myth and Fact (Cambridge,

ma, 1987), p. 140.

16 Louis Sullivan, ‘The Modern Phase of Architecture’, Inland Architect and News Record

(June 1899); cited in Lauren Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks (Cambridge, ma,

1987), p. 18.

17 Mary Gay Humphries, ‘House Decoration and Furnishing’, in Lyman Abbott, ed., The

House and Home (New York, 1896), vol. 1, p. 157.

18 ‘Houses and Habits’, Harper’s Bazaar, 45 (February 1911), p. 57.

19 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990); Robin D. G.

Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York, 1996), p. 77.

20 Joanne E. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage-Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930

(Chicago, 1988), pp. 5–7. Also see Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social

Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York, 1990); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female

Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991); Dolores Hayden, The Grand

Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods

and Cities (Cambridge, ma, 1981).

21 Helen Campbell, ‘Household Art and the Microbe’, hb, vi (October 1895), pp. 18–21;

Campbell, Household Economics (New York, 1897); Isabel Bevier, The House: Its Plan,

Décor and Care (Chicago, 1904; title varies in later edns).

22 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence [1903] (Urbana, 1972), pp. 52,


67. Also see Poly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s

Architectural Feminism (Amherst, 1988).

23 See Jean-Louis Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and The

American Challenge, 1893–1960 (Paris, 1995), p. 77, for an illustration from Bruno Taut’s

Die neue Wohnung (Berlin, 1924).

24 Adolf Loos, ‘Plumbers’ (1898); reprinted in James O. Newman and John H. Smith,

eds and trans., Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900 (Cambridge, ma,

1982), pp. 45–9. These passions still ran strong 25 years later when D. H. Lawrence

described ‘some insisting on the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these

being the two great American specialties’ (Studies in Classic American Literature

[1923; New York, 1964], pp. vii–viii).

25 Marion Talbot, Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Home Economics (Lake

Placid, ny, 1902), p. 22; cited in Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti, eds, Rethinking Home

Economics (Ithaca, ny, 1997), p. 28.

26 The Journal published two other models by Wright, one later that year, the other in 1907.

27 Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 (Princeton,

1931), pp. 73–5.

28 Cited in Samuel Howe, ‘Do Architects Read?’, ar, xxxii (December 1912), p. 569. In

addition to monographs, see Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four

Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, ma, 1983); Robert

Winter, ed., Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California

(Berkeley, ca, 1997).

29 Irving Gill, ‘The Home of the Future: The New Architecture of the West: Small Homes

for a Great Country’, The Craftsman (May 1916); reprinted in Thomas S. Hines, Irving

Gill and the Architecture of Reform (New York, 2000), p. 126.

30 Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl, Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from

Sears, Roebuck and Company (Washington, dc, 1996), p. 19; David D. Reiff, Houses from

Books (University Park, pa, 2000).

31 Laura Chase, ‘Eden in the Orange Groves: Bungalows and Courtyard Houses in Los

Angeles’, Landscape, xxv (1981), pp. 29–36; J. Curtis and L. Ford, ‘Bungalow Courts in

San Diego’, Journal of San Diego History, xxxiv (1988), pp. 78–92.

32 Eric Sandweiss, St Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia,

2001), pp. 199–204; Christopher Silver, ‘Neighborhood Planning in Historical

Perspective’, Journal of the American Planning Association, li (Spring 1985), p. 174.

33 Also see Abigail Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture,

1890–1920 (Chicago, 1995).

34 Jane Addams, ‘A Function of the Social Settlement’, Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science (May 1899); cited in Christopher Lasch, ed., The Social

Thought of Jane Addams (New York, 1965), p. 187.

35 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, Annual of the Fourteenth

Annual Exhibit of the Chicago Architectural Club (1901); reprinted in Bruce Brooks

Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings (New York, 1992), vol. i, pp. 66, 69.

36 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York,

1978), pp. 21–65.

37 Frederic Thompson, ‘Amusing the Million’, Everyman’s Magazine (September 1908);

cited in John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century

(New York, 1978), p. 63.

38 Simon M. Paten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York, 1907); cited in Daniel M. Fox,

The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N. Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory

(Ithaca, ny, 1967), pp. 102–3.

2 8 4

chapter three: Electric Modernities, 1919–1932

1 Sheldon Cheney, The New World Architecture (New York, 1930), p. viii; Robert Updegraff,

The New American Tempo and the Stream of Life (Chicago, 1929).

2 William Carlos Williams, ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study: Paterson – The Strike’ (1914);

reprinted in A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, eds, The Collected Poems of

William Carlos Williams (New York, 1987), p. 31.

3 Statements by Ralph Walker and George Howe in ‘Modernist and Traditionalist’,

af, liii (July 1930), pp. 49–50.

4 Henry McBride, ‘Modern Art’, Dial (April 1919), pp. 353–5; cited in Maria Morris

Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography between the World

Wars (New York, 1989), p. 46.

5 Irving K. Pond, ‘From Foreign Shores’, jaia, xi (December 1923), p. 475; xii (March 1924),

p. 122; cited in Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America (Cambridge, ma, 2001), p. 14.

6 Cheney, New World Architecture, p. 80; Edwin Avery Park, New Backgrounds for a New

Age (New York, 1928), pp. 143, 147; Harvey Wiley Corbett, ‘Architecture’, in Encyclopaedia

Britannica (New York, 1926), vol. i, p. 199.

7 Edith Elmer Wood and Frederick Ackerman, The Housing Famine: How To End It (New

York, 1920); Ackerman, diary note for 1934 cited in Michael H. Lang, ‘Town Planning

and Radicalism in the Progressive Era: The Legacy of F. L. Ackerman’, Planning

Perspectives, xvi (2001), p. 147.

8 Frederick Ackerman, ‘Art and Americanization’, Western Architect, xxix (March 1920),

pp. 23–4; Cheney, New World Architecture, p. 120.

9 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells [1923] (New York,

1927), p. 33.

10 Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, The City (Chicago, 1925). Perry’s 1929 scheme appro-

priated the text and term from William Drummund’s 1913 proposal for the Chicago

City Club.

11 Frederick Ackerman, Foreword to Charles G. Ramsey and Harold R. Sleeper, Architectural

Graphic Standards (New York, 1932). Ramsey and Sleeper worked in Ackerman’s office.

See Paul Emmons, ‘Diagrammatic Practices: The Office of Frederick L. Ackerman and

Architectural Graphic Standards’, jsah, lxiv (March 2005), pp. 4–21.

12 For example, see Daniel Bell. Work and its Discontents (Boston, ma, 1956), p. 8.

13 Michael A. Mikkelson, ‘A Word about the New Format’, ar, lxiii (January 1928), pp. 1–2;

‘Two Problems of Architecture’, ar, lxv (January 1929), p. 65; Robert L. Davison, ‘Prison

Architecture’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1931); cited

in Hyungmai Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity

in America (Cambridge, ma, 2002), p. 151.

14 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration [1929]

(New York, 1993), pp. 205–6.

15 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style [1932] (New York,

1995), p. 19.

16 Ibid. Also see Terence Riley, International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern

Art (New York, 1992)

17 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘The International Style Twenty Years After’ (1951), appendix

to reprint of The International Style (1995), pp. 241, 243, 252.

18 Knud Lönberg-Holm, ‘Two Shows: A Comment on the Aesthetic Racket’, Shelter, ii

(April 1932), p. 17.

19 Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Disenchanted Mountain: The Skyscraper and the City’, in Giorgio

Ciucci, et al., The American City from the Civil War to the New Deal, trans. Barbara


Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, ma, 1979); Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune

Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (1993; Cambridge

and New York, 2000), p. 293.

20 The first use of the term in English was in Bevis Hillier, Art Deco (London and New

York, 1968).

21 Herbert Croly, ‘New Dimensions in Architectural Effects’, ar, lvii (January 1925),

pp. 93–4; Ezra Pound, ‘Patria Mia’ (1913), in William Cookson, ed., Ezra Pound, Selected

Prose, 1909–1965 (New York, 1950), p. 107; cited in Wanda Corn, The Great American

Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 158.

22 Fiske Kimball, American Architecture (New York, 1928); Ely Jacques Kahn, ‘The Office

Building Problem in New York’, af, xli (September 1924), p. 96; cited in Jewel Stern

and John A. Stuart, Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York

(New York, 2006), p. 95.

23 Michael Lewis, ‘Rhapsody in Chrome’, New York Times (26 May 2005), p. f8. A 1997

survey of New York architects rated the Chrysler far and away their favourite building,

while it ranked ninth on the aia’s 2006 survey of the American public.

24 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, ma, 2003),

pp. 225–8. San Antonio’s 1928 Milam Building first provided air conditioning in rental

spaces. The best account of psfs is William Jordy, American Buildings and their

Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Garden

City, ny, 1976), pp. 87–164.

25 Edward Wolner, ‘Design and Civic Identity in Cincinnati’s Carew Tower Complex’,

jsah, xcii (March 1992), pp. 35–47. The other garage was in Chicago’s Jewelers Building

(1926).

26 Lewis Mumford, ‘The Sky Line: The American Tradition’, New Yorker (11 March

1939), p. 37; ‘Frozen Music or Solidified Static? Reflections on Radio City’, New Yorker

(20 June 1931), p. 28; ‘The Sky Line’, New Yorker (11 March 1935), p. 37.

27 Carrier Engineering Corporation, The Story of Manufactured Weather (New York, 1919).

28 Eric Sundstrom, Work Places: The Psychology of the Physical Environment in Offices and

Factories (New York, 1986), pp. 44–7.

29 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr, Review of Wie Baut Amerika?, ar, lxiii (June 1928),

pp. 594–5.

30 Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America

(Cambridge, ma, 1991), pp. 17, 77; rpaa texts in Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth

Migration (Cambridge, ma, 1976).

31 Donald A. Johnson, Planning the Great Metropolis: The 1929 Regional Plan (London,

1996).

32 The word realtor was invented in 1916 to distinguish members of the National

Association of Real Estate Boards from less ethical sellers. See Jeffrey Hornstein, A

Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle

Class (Durham, nc, 2005); Carolyn S. Loeb, Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers’

Subdivisions in the 1920s (Baltimore, 2001); Robert Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares:

Suburbia, 1870–1930 (New Haven, 2005).

33 Henry Wright, ‘The Home Ideal versus Reality’, American Federationist (June 1926),

pp. 65–9.

34 For astute early recognition of Southern California modernists, see Cheney, New World

Architecture; Pauline Gibling [Schindler], ‘Modern California Architects’, Creative Art, x

(1932), pp. 111–15; and the pioneering work of Esther McCoy.

35 Richard Neutra, Amerika: Die Stilbildung des neuen Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten

(Vienna, 1930), p. 76.

2 8 6

36 Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography [1932] (New York, 1977), p. 258.

37 Rudolph Schindler, ‘A Cooperation Dwelling’, T-Square, ii (February 1932), pp. 20–21;

Pauline Schindler, letter (1918); cited in Robert Sweeney, ‘Life at King’s Road’, in Elizabeth

A. T. Smith and Michael Darling, eds, The Architecture of R. M. Schindler (Los Angeles,

2000), p. 87. Also see Enric Miralles, ‘Schindler-Chace House’, Quaderns, clxxxv

(April–June 1990), pp. 4–11.

38 See Stefanos Polyzoides, ‘Schindler, Lovell and the Newport Beach House’, Oppositions,

xviii (Fall 1979), pp. 60–73; August Sarnitz, ‘Proportion and Beauty:The Lovell Beach

House’, jsah, xlv (December 1986), pp. 374–88; ‘Unusual House is Built of Concrete and

Glass’, Popular Mechanics, xlvii (June 1927), p. 969.

39 Richard Neutra, Life and Shape (New York, 1962), p. 220.

40 Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (New York,

1982), p. 89.

41 Wright, Autobiography, p. 277. See Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the

Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York, 1998), pp. 32–61, on

Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House.

42 Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (New York,

1982), p. 343.

43 Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, ma, 1957).

44 R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage’ (1927), Shelter

(1931); reprinted in James Meller, ed., The Buckminster Fuller Reader (London, 1970),

p. 242.

45 Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller (New York, 1990), p. 30.

46 Randolph W. Sexton, American Apartment Houses, Hotels, and Apartment Hotels of

Today (New York, 1929), p. 1.

47 Henry Wright, ‘The Apartment House: A Review and A Forecast’, ar, lxix (March 1931),

pp. 186–7.

48 A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, ‘Real Estate Subdivisions for Low-Cost Housing’,

ar, lxix (April 1931), pp. 324–7.

49 Knud Lönberg-Holm, ‘The Gasoline Filling and Service Station’, ar, lxvii (June 1930),

pp. 562–84.

50 George Nichols, ‘The Development of the Medical Center’, Architect, x (July 1928), p. 451;

Marrion Wilcox, ‘New York’s Great Medical Center’, ar, lviii (August 1925), pp. 101–15;

cited in Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (New

York, 1994), pp. 214, 223. Also see Dr Henry Williams, ‘A Hospital in the Clouds: The

Story of New York’s Skyscraper Medical Center’, World’s Work, liii (February 1927),

pp. 408–18.

51 Allan Brandt and David Sloane, ‘Of Beds and Benches: Building the Modern American

Hospital’, in Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, eds, The Architecture of Science

(Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 101–15.

52 Vachel Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture (New York, 1916), pp. 273–9.

53 John Eberson, ‘The Capital Theatre’, af, xlii (June 1925), p. 373.

54 Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the

Movie Theatre Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven, 1994), p. 9. Also see David James,

The Most Typical Avant Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

(Berkeley, ca, 2005); David Naylor, American Picture Palaces (New York, 1981); Lary

May, ‘Making the American Way: Moderne Theatres, Audiences and the Film Industry,

1929–1945’, Prospects (1987), pp. 89–124; Ben Schlanger, ‘Motion-Picture Theaters’,

in Talbot Hamlin, ed., Forms and Functions of Modern Architecture (New York, 1952),

vol. iii, pp. 445–77.


55 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York, 1930),

p. 118. Kiesler’s ‘Design-Correlations’ series appeared in ar, lxxxii, lxxxiv (April–July

1937; September 1939).

56 Janet Flanner, The Cubical City [1926] (Carbondale, il, 1974).

chapter four: Architecture, the Public and the State, 1933–1945

1 T. V. Smith, ‘The New Deal as a Cultural Phenomenon’, in F.S.C. Northrup, ed.,

Ideological Differences and World Order (New Haven, 1949), pp. 214–15, 225.

2 Thurman Arnold, The Symbols of Government (New Haven, 1935), p. 241; Arnold, The

Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, 1937); cited in Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism:

American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, nc, 2000), p. 10.

3 An important book is Jean-Louis Cohen, ed., Les Années 30s: l’architecture et les arts de

l’espace entre industrie et nostalgie (Paris, 1997), on overlaps and incongruities in France,

Germany, Italy, the ussr and the United States. Also see Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational

Aesthetics (Dijon, 2002).

4 Frederick Gutheim, ‘Seven Years of Public Buildings’, Magazine of Art, xxvii (July 1940),

pp. 433, 443.

5 Make It New: Essays by Ezra Pound (London, 1934).

6 Joseph Hudnut, ‘Architecture Discovers the Present’, American Scholar, vii (Winter

1938), p. 106. See Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter

Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville, 2007).

7 moma Committee on Architecture and Industrial Art, ‘Architecture in Government

Housing’, bound typescript, 1936. The curator was Ernestine Fanti.

8 See Telesis Environmental Research Group, Space for Living (San Francisco, 1940).

9 ‘Where is Modern?’, af, lxviii (June 1938), p. 468.

10 Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston, ma, 1934), pp. 147–8, 157, 253–4; Bauer,

‘The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing’, af, cvi (May 1957), pp. 140–42, 219, 221.

11 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture [1941] (New York, 1967), pp. 51–2.

12 Mary Colter, Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower at

Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest

(Grand Canyon National Park, 1933); cited in Arnold Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of

the Southwest (New York, 2002), pp. 187–225.

13 See, for example, Garrett Eckbo, Daniel Kiley and James Rose, ‘Landscape Design in

the Urban Environment’, ar, lxxxvii (May 1939); reprinted in Marc Treib, ed., Modern

Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, ma, 1993), pp. 78–82.

14 Wolfgang Born, ‘Geo-Architecture: An American Contribution to the Art of the Future’,

Magazine of Art, xvi (January 1944), pp. 202–7.

15 James Marston Fitch, American Building: The Forces that Shape It (Boston, ma, 1947),

pp. 143–92.

16 Public Works Administration: The First 3 Years (Washington, dc, 1936), p. 1; America

Builds: The Record of the pwa (Washington, dc, 1939), pp. 288–91; C. W. Short and R.

Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings: Architecture under the Public Works Administration,

1933–39 [1939] (New York, 1986).

17 ‘pwa Has Changed Face of us’, Life (1 April 1940), p. 61.

18 ‘Alphabets and Architects’, aa, clxviii (January 1936), p. 18. The Golden Gate Bridge

ranked fifth in a 2007 poll of Americans’ favourite architecture sponsored by the aia

(see www.aia150.org). A 1937 exhibition on modern landscape architecture at the San

Francisco Museum of Art featured Margaret Keeley Brown’s prescient but unbuilt

2 8 8

response to homelessness: a trailer camp for 300 families at the San Francisco approach

to the new Bay Bridge with gardens and basic services (Grace Morley, ed., Contemporary

Landscape Architecture and its Sources, San Francisco, 1937, p. 33).

19 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People

[1937] (New York, 1947), pp. 75–7; cited in Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America:

Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, ma, 2001), pp. 265, 269.

20 The two opposing interpretations of Moses are Robert Caro’s critique of abusive power,

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974), and the neo-

liberal apology, Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds, Robert Moses and the Modern

City: The Transformation of New York (New York, 2007).

21 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York, 1997), pp. 118–23; Pat Kilham, Charles

and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ma, 1995).

22 Frederick Gutheim, ‘tva: A New Phase in Architecture’, Magazine of Art, xxxiii

(September 1940), p. 527; Arthur Morgan, ‘The Human Problem of the Tennessee Valley

Authority’, Landscape Architecture, xxiv (April 1934), p. 12; Walter Creese, tva’s Public

Planning: The Vision, The Reality (Knoxville, tn, 1990); Tim Culvahouse, ed., The

Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion (New York, 2007).

23 The moma exhibition on tva was in 1941. The quote is from Elizabeth Mock, Built in

usa, 1932–1944 (New York, 1944), p. 111.

24 Stuart Chase, quoted in ‘A Vision in Kilowatts’, Fortune (April 1933); cited in Christine

Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison, Architecture and Nature: Creating the American

Landscape (London and New York, 2003), p. 138.

25 Marshall Wilson, ‘Photographs in Norris Reservoir Area’ (n.d.); cited in Phoebe Cutler,

The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven, 1985), p. 137. By 1942 up to 2,000,000

American and European tourists a year were visiting the dams.

26 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The New Building for S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc.’ (unpublished 1936

press release); ‘Frank Lloyd Wright Designs the Office of the Future’, American Business

(May 1939), p. 41; ‘Johnson’s Wax’, Life (8 May 1939); cited in Jonathan Lipman, Frank

Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings (New York, 1986), pp. 182, 93.

27 Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘Broadacre City: An Architect’s Vision’, New York Times Magazine

(20 March 1932); Wright, ‘Today . . . Tomorrow, American Tomorrow’, aa, cxli (May

1932), pp. 14–17, both cited in Donald Leslie Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright versus America:

The 1930s (Cambridge, ma, 1990), pp. 109–10.

28 See Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, 1996); Franklin

Toker, Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most

Extraordinary House (New York, 2003).

29 ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’, special issue of af, lxviii (January 1938), p. 78.

30 Gertrude Fish, ed., The Story of Housing (New York, 1979), p. 203. Wealthy families like

the Kaufmanns did not need fha loans.

31 Howard Myers, ‘Editorial: Modern Houses in America’, af, lxxi (July 1939), p. 34.

32 Ibid.; Katherine Morrow Ford, ‘Modern is Regional’, House and Garden, af, lxxix

(March 1941), pp. 14–17; James Ford and Katherine Morrow Ford, The Modern House in

America (New York, 1940), pp. 6–14.

33 Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York, 1962), p. 14.

34 ‘Modernism: The House That Works’, Fortune, xii (October 1935), pp. 59–65, 94.

35 Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity

(New York and Cambridge, 2006).

36 Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era

(Chicago, 1996), pp. 100–101. Bauer estimated that, since World War One, European

governments had aided in the construction of at least 4.5 million new housing units,


providing shelter to around 16 per cent of the population, though only about half was

affordable for the lowest-paid workers.

37 Joseph Hudnut, ‘Housing and the Democratic Process’, ar, xciii (June 1943), p. 44.

38 Richard Pommer, ‘The Architecture of Early Housing in the United States during the

Early 1930s’, jsah, xxxvii (December 1978), pp. 235–64.

39 Federal Writers’ Project, wpa Guide to New York City [1941] (New York, 1992), p. 392;

Radford, Modern Housing, pp. 146–76; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York

City (New York, 1990), pp. 207–35; Roy Strickland and Joel Saunders, ‘The Harlem River

Houses’, Harvard Architectural Review, ii (Spring 1981), pp. 48-51.

40 R. L. Duffus, ‘The Architect in a Modern World’, ar, lxxix (September 1936), p. 182.

41 Means tests required that tenant incomes be at least 20 per cent below what local realtors

considered the bare minimum for market-rate rentals, which discouraged aspirations.

42 ‘Farm Security Architecture’, af, lxxiv (January 1941), p. 3; Talbot Hamlin, ‘Farm

Security Architecture,’ pp, xxii (November 1941), pp. 709–20.

43 Albert Roth, Nouvelle architecture/Neue Architektur/New Architecture (Zurich, 1940);

‘Genetrix’, in Machine-Made America, special issue of ar, cxxi (May 1957), p. 356.

44 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1960 speech accepting the aia Gold Medal; cited in

William H. Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects, vol. 4: The Impact of

European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Garden City, 1976), p. 221.

45 Mies van der Rohe, Introduction to Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New City: Principles of

Planning (Chicago, 1944), p. xv.

46 Daniel Bluestone, ‘Mecca Flat Blues’, jsah, lvii (December 1998), pp. 382–403; Sarah

Whiting, ‘Bas-Relief Urbanism: Chicago’s Figured Field’, in Phyllis Lambert, ed., Mies

in America (New York, 2005), pp. 642–91.

47 Joel Davidson, ‘Building for War, Preparing for Peace: World War ii and the Military-

Industrial Complex’, in Donald Albrecht, ed., World War ii and the American Dream:

How Wartime Building Changed a Nation (Cambridge, ma, 1995), p. 197.

48 ‘A New Era in Plastics’, Newsweek (17 May 1943), p. 42.

49 ‘The Seabees: The Navy’s Fighting Builders’, af, lxxx (February 1944), pp. 48–58; ‘Navy

Architecture’, af, lxxxiii (December 1945), pp. 73–9; Julie Decker and Chris Chiei,

Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age (New York, 2005). Goff ’s Ruth Ford House

in Aurora, Illinois (1947), took inventive Quonset-based designs even farther by adding

wartime detritus like acrylic aircraft nose-cones.

50 1956 conversation cited in Philip B. Welch, ed., Goff on Goff: Conversations and Lectures

(Norman, ok, 1996), pp. 23–9.

51 Peter Reed, ‘Enlisting Modernism’, in Albrecht, World War ii, pp. 2–41; Hugh Casson,

Homes for the Million: An Account of the Housing Achievement of the usa, 1940–1945

(Harmondsworth, 1946), pp. 5, 16–17.

52 Elaine Tyler May, ‘Rosie the Riveter Gets Married’, in Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E.

Hirsch, eds, The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War ii

Chicago, 1996), p. 130; Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of

Housing, Work and Family Life (New York, 1984), pp. 4–6.

53 Robert Friedel, ‘Scarcity and Promise: Materials and American Domestic Culture during

World War ii’, in Albrecht, World War ii, p. 54.

54 Casson, Homes, p. 45.

55 Antonin Raymond, ‘Working with usha under the Lanham Act’, special Defense Housing

issue, pp, xxii (November 1941), p. 694.

56 ‘Wartime Housing’, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, ix (May 1942); special War

Housing issue, af, lxxvi (May 1942).

57 ‘Carver Court’, af, lxxxi (December 1944), pp. 109–16; Sarah Williams Goldhagen,

2 9 0

Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven, 2001), pp. 18–33. Stonorov and Kahn also

produced two popular pamphlets for the Revere Company Better Living series.

58 ‘Defense Houses by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Architects,’ af, lxxiii (November

1940), pp. 444–9; Neil Levine, ‘“The Significance of Facts”: Mies’ Collages Up Close and

Personal’, Assemblage, xxxvii (December 1998), pp. 70–101. Hyun-Tae Jung’s forthcom-

ing dissertation (Columbia University) on the origins of som has been a valuable asset.

59 Citation from wall panel in 1945: Creativity and Crisis: Chicago Architecture and Design of

the World War ii Era, Art Institute of Chicago exhibition, 2005.

60 Roland Wank, ‘Nowhere to Go but Forward’, Magazine of Art, xxxiv (January 1941), p. 8.

61 Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life (17 February 1941), p. 63. Luce’s writings

from Life also appeared in an edited volume, The American Century (New York, 1941).

He published Time, Life, Fortune and Architectural Forum. Olivier Zunz’s Why the

American Century? (Chicago, 1998) argues that the ideology of American exceptionalism

pre-dates World War ii, but was imposed on the world only after the war ended.

62 Charles Eames and John Entenza, ‘House’ and ‘Prefabricated Housing’, Arts & Architecture,

xliv (July 1944), pp. 24–52.

63 Mock, Built in usa, pp. 13, 14, 21–2. The project originated as Mock’s section of a major

moma exhibition in 1944; a new catalogue of 1947 entitled Built in usa, 1932–1944 was

translated into German the following year.

chapter five: The Triumph of Modernism, 1946–1964

1 Marcel Breuer, Conference proceedings for ‘What is Happening to Modern

Architecture?’, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, xv (Spring 1948), p. 15.

2 Henry-David Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler, Built in usa: Post-war Architecture (New

York, 1952), pp. 12, 17.

3 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960); reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The

Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago, 1993), vol. iv, p. 85.

4 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of

Genius’, Architectural Review, ci (January 1947), pp. 3–6.

5 Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (New York, 1959), pp. 72–4.

6 Chester Hartman, ‘The Housing of Relocated Families’, in James Q. Wilson, ed., Urban

Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (Cambridge, ma, 1966), p. 321; Douglas S.

Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the

Underclass (Cambridge, ma, 1993), pp. 69–75.

7 ‘The New City’, Fortune (February 1960); cited in Michael Johns, Moment of Grace:

The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley, ca, 2003), p. 30.

8 Frederick Gutheim, Housing as Environment: A Report on the Research Conference

‘The Role of Social Research in Housing Design’ (New York, 1953).

9 ‘19 Office Floors without Columns’, af, cii (May 1955), p. 116; Clarence Randall,

Chairman of Inland Steel Company, quoted in ‘Inland’s Steel Showcase’, af, cviii (April

1958), p. 89; both cited in Reinhold Martin, The Organization Complex: Architecture,

Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, ma, 2003), p. 104.

10 ‘The Architects from Skid’s Row’, Fortune, lvii (January 1958), p. 215.

11 Mies van der Rohe, Transcript of a 1955 interview with John Peters; cited in Phyllis

Lambert, ‘Mies Immersion’, in Lambert, ed., Mies in America (New York, 2001), p. 193;

Lambert, ‘How a Building Gets Built’, Vassar Alumni Magazine (February 1959), pp. 14–16;

cited in Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago, 1985), p. 272.

12 Lewis Mumford, ‘The Sky Line: The Lesson of the Master’, New Yorker (13 September


1958); Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, trans. Robert Erich

Wolfe [1976] (New York, 1979), pp. 340–41.

13 ‘Architecture for the Future Constructs a Versailles of Industry’, Life (21 May 1956); cited

in Scott Knowles and Stuart Leslie, ‘“Industrial Versailles”: Eero Saarinen’s Corporate

Campuses for gm, ibm and at&t’, Isis, xcii (March 2001), p. 5.

14 Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, eds, The Architecture of Science (Cambridge, ma,

1999); Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds, Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale

Research (Stanford, 1992).

15 Gwendolyn Wright, ‘The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley,’ jae, liv (November

2000), pp. 88–94. John Harwood, ‘The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the

Information Age Interior’, gr, xii (Summer 2003) pp. 3–31.

16 ‘Hospital of Ideas’, af, xcvi (February 1952), pp. 116–23.

17 ‘New Shells’, Time (15 August 1949), p. 60.

18 ‘Residential Design, 1951’, pa, xxxii (March 1951), pp. 67–86; Sarah Amelar, ‘The Long

Journey Back: 50 Years of Record Houses’, ar, cxcvi (April 2005), p. 132. Various annual

awards were inaugurated, beginning with pa’s in 1948 and the aia’s in 1949.

19 ‘American Style House’, hb (February 1951), pp. 80–83; Marion Gough, ‘Defining the

American Way of Life Executed in the New American Style’, hb, xciii (May 1951),

pp. 167–75; T. H. Robsjohn Gibbings, ‘Do You Know the Difference between Modern

and Modernistic?’, hb, lxxxviii (October 1946), pp. 135, 236.

20 ‘Richard Neutra Is “Man of the Year”’, Time (15 August 1949), p. 2.

21 Reyner Banham, ‘Klarheit, Ehrlichkeit, Einfachkeit . . . and Wit Too!: The Case Study

Houses in the World’s Eyes’, in Elizabeth A. T. Smith, ed., Blueprints for Modern Living:

History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge, ma, 1989), pp. 183–96.

22 Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders (New York, 1987), p. 161; Jon C.

Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore, 1986), p. 100.

23 ‘New Shells’, p. 58. William H. White accentuated the advantages of cities and problems of

‘sprawl’ in The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, ny, 1958), a book he edited for Fortune.

See Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago, 2005). These ‘first-tier

suburbs’ are now seen in a more positive light, in comparison with later developments.

24 William Dobriner, ed., Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, nj, 1963); cited in Lizabeth

Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

(New York, 2003), pp. 200–214.

25 Michael Sorkin, in Hollin Hills: Community of Vision, A Semicentennial History,

1949–1999 (Alexandria, va, 2000), p. 39.

26 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Archi-

tectural History (New York, 1998), pp. 126–59. Citation (p. 147) is from Hilary Lewis and

John O’Connor, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words (New York, 1994), p. 49.

27 ‘Regionalism and Nationalism’, Texas Quarterly, i (February 1958); reprinted in Vincent

B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity,

Modernity and Tradition (New York, 2007), pp. 57–63, which also contains thoughtful

statements by Neutra, Belluschi and other modernists.

28 Plastics in Housing (Cambridge, ma, 1955); Stephen Phillips, ‘Plastics’, in Beatriz

Colomina, Annmarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim, eds, Cold War Hothouses: Inventing

Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy (New York, 2004), pp. 91–123; Carl Koch, At

Home with Tomorrow (New York, 1958), p. 49; Bryan Irwin, ‘The Grandfather of Prefab’,

pa, lxxv (February 1994), pp. 62–5.

29 Esther McCoy, ‘Sim Bruce Richards’, Nature in Architecture, exh. cat., San Diego Natural

History Museum (1984); cited in Alan Hess, Organic Architecture: The Other Modernism

(Layton, ut, 2006), p. 76.

2 9 2

30 Beatriz Reciado, ‘Pornotopia’, in Colomina et al., Cold War Hothouses, p. 218.

31 Hitchcock and Drexler, Built in usa, p. 21.

32 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London and Baltimore,

1971). Also see John Chase, Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building

Production in the Vernacular City (New York, 2000).

33 James Marston Fitch, in San Francisco Chronicle (11 December 1949); cited in Pierluigi

Serraino, NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism (San Francisco, 2006), p. 20.

34 Elizabeth Wood, ‘Realities of Urban Redevelopment’, Journal of Housing, iii (December

1945–January 1946), pp. 12–14.

35 Alistair Gordon, Beach Houses: Andrew Geller (New York, 2003), p. 95.

36 Wallace Harrison, cited in George Dudley, The Workshop of Peace: Designing the United

Nations (New York, 2003).

37 Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller (New York, 1990), p. 183.

38 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies (New York,

1998), pp. 98–100.

39 Haskell coined the term in an unsigned affirmation, ‘Googie Architecture’, House and

Home, i (February 1952), pp. 86–8. As Alan Hess explains in Googie Redux: Ultramodern

Roadside Architecture (San Francisco, 2006), this exuberant ‘style’ emerged in the 1930s.

40 The 940 shopping centres in 1957 more than doubled by 1960, and doubled again by

1963. Like downtowns and suburbs, they were increasingly divided by class. See Cohen,

Consumers’ Republic, pp. 258, 292–309.

41 Morris Lapidus, ‘The Architecture of Emotion’, jaia, xxxvi (November 1961), pp. 55–8; cited

in Alice Friedmann, ‘Merchandising Miami Beach: Morris Lapidus and the Architecture of

Abundance’, Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, xxv (2005), p. 249.

42 Douglas Haskell, ‘Eero Saarinen, 1919–1961’, af, xv (October 1961), p. 96; ‘Airport City,

usa’, Newsweek (5 April 1965), p. 90; Wall Street Journal (26 April 1966); cited in Alastair

Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure

(New York, 2004), pp. 186, 215.

43 Katherine Kuh, ‘What Should a Museum Be? Plus and Minus of the Building Boom’, Art

in America, xlix (1961), pp. 41–5.

44 ‘Desegregation’s Impact on Building’, af, cvii (November 1957), pp. 128–31, 233.

45 Paul Tillich, ‘Contemporary Protestant Architecture’ (1962); reprinted in Tillich, On Art

and Architecture (New York, 1987), pp. 214–20.

46 Anne Loveland and Otis Wheeler, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch (Columbia, mi,

2003), p. 153.

47 Douglas Haskell, ‘Architecture and Popular Taste’, af, cix (August 1958), pp. 104–9;

Haskell, ‘Jazz in Architecture’, af, cxiii (September 1960), pp. 110–15; Thomas Creighton,

‘The New Sensualism’, pa, xl (October 1959), pp. 80–87; Creighton, ‘Sixties, the State of

Architecture’, pa, xlii (March–May 1961).

chapter six: Challenging Orthodoxies, 1965–1984

1 See Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1993).

2 Peter Eisenman, in ‘Cardboard Architecture’, Casabella, xxxvii (February 1973), said

the term ‘questions the nature of reality of the physical environment’ (p. 24).

3 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, 1966), p. 16.

4 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, ‘A Significance for a&p Parking Lots or

Learning from Las Vegas’, af, cxxviii (March 1968); reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, ed.,

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (New York, 1996), pp. 308–21; Moore cited in


John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, Conversations with Architects (New York, 1973), p. 235.

5 See Robert Melnick and Arnold Alanen, eds, Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America

(Baltimore, 2000); Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory and

Criticism.

6 Paul Davidoff, ‘Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning’, Journal of the apa (1965); reprinted

in Richard T. LeGates et al., eds, The City Reader (New York, 1996), pp. 421–34; Rex Curry,

‘Community Design Centers’, in Bryan Bell, ed., Good Deeds, Good Design: Community

Service through Architecture (New York, 2004), pp. 61–70; Designer/Builder, based in Santa

Fe, which describes contemporary advocacy.

7 Theodore Roszak, quoted in ‘Advertisements for a Counter Culture’, pa, li (July 1970), p. 70.

8 The Cosanti Foundation reissued Soleri’s Arcology: The City in the Image of Man on the

occasion of its 30th anniversary in 2000.

9 Douglas Davis, ‘New Architecture: Building for Man’, Newsweek (19 April 1971), pp. 78–90.

10 Charles Moore described ‘exclusive’ groups, and a new more ‘inclusive’one, in ‘Statement

of the Jurors’, pa, xlviii (January 1967); cited in Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in

American Architecture [1969] (New York, 1977), p. 117.

11 Vernon E. Jordan, ‘The New Negativism’, Newsweek (14 August 1978), p. 13.

12 Robert Stern’s ‘The Doubles of Post-Modern’ in the first Harvard Architecture Review

(Spring 1980) played up this schism, but reduced it to a literally superficial notion of

‘schismatic’ dichotomies.

13 Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘The Troubled State of Modern Architecture’, New York Review of

Books, xxvii (1 May 1980).

14 Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace (New York,

1979), p. 3.

15 Michael Sorkin, Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings (New York, 1991), p. 272.

16 C. Sibley and P. Beney, Atlanta: A Brave and Beautiful City (Atlanta, 1986); cited in

Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams

(London and New York, 1996), p. 54.

17 Arthur Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York, 1979), p. 72.

18 Ibid., p. 83; Pamela Heyne, Today’s Architectural Mirror (New York, 1982).

19 Quoted in Joseph Giovannini, ‘The Grand Reach of Corporate Architecture’, New York

Times (20 January 1985), sect. 3, p. 28.

20 Richard Ingersoll, ‘Die Tunnels der Liebe’, Archithèse, xx (January 1990), pp. 28–30.

21 Citations from James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the

World Trade Center (New York, 2003), p. 116.

22 Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered’, New Criterion, i

(November 1982), p. 17.

23 See Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine (Cambridge, 1970); Negroponte,

Soft Architecture Machines (Cambridge, ma, 1975), p. 177.

24 Tod Marder, ed., The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture

(Cambridge, ma, 1985), pp. 63–74.

25 Paul Rudolph, ‘The Mobile Home is the 20th Century Brick’, ar, cxliii (April 1968),

pp. 137–46.

26 Robert Goodman’s After the Planners (New York, 1971) castigated even well-intended

modern architecture as irrelevant at best and at worst oppressive, co-opted by corporate

capitalism and the war machine.

27 Building the American City: Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems

(Washington, dc, 1968), pp. 123–8.

28 Katharine Bristol, ‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth’, jae, xciv (May 1991), pp. 163–71, reprinted in

Keith L. Eggener, ed., American Architectural History (London and New York, 2004), pp.

2 9 4

352–64; Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture [1974] (New York, 1984),

p. 9.

29 See John Sharratt, ‘Urban Neighborhood Preservation and Development’, Process

Architecture, xiv (1980), pp. 28–32; Peter G. Rowe, Modernity and Housing (Cambridge,

ma, 1993), pp. 244–52.

30 Stern, New Directions, p. 86.

31 Antoine Predock, ‘Surrogate Landscapes’, Places, v (1988), pp. 54–9.

32 Venturi; cited in Ellen Perry Berkeley, ‘Complexities and Contradictions’, pa, xlvi (May

1965), p. 168.

33 Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the

Criticism of Language’, Oppositions, iii (1974); expanded in Tafuri’s The Sphere and the

Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, ma,

1987), and reprinted in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge,

ma, 1998), pp. 146–73.

34 ‘Sculpture for Living’, Life, lix (3 December 1965) pp. 124–9; cited in Liane Lefaivre,

‘Living Outside the Box: Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty’s Lincoln House’,

Harvard Design Magazine, xxiv (Spring–Summer 2006), pp. 72–8.

35 Charles Moore, ‘You Have To Pay for the Public Life’, Perspecta (1965); reprinted in

Moore’s collected essays of that title, ed. Kevin Keim (Cambridge, ma, 2001), pp. 111–41.

36 Hal Lancaster, ‘Stadium Projects are Proliferating amid Debate over Benefit to Cities’,

Wall Street Journal (20 March 1987), p. 37; cited in Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B.

Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, ma, 1989), p. 277.

37 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum, v (June 1967), pp. 12–25; Phil Patton,

‘Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space’, Art in America, lxv

(July–August 1977), pp. 80–87; Helen Searing, ‘The Brillo Box in the Warehouse:

Museums of Contemporary Art and Industrial Conversions’, in The Andy Warhol

Museum (Pittsburgh, 1994), pp. 39–66.

38 Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens, cited in Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Cultural Logic of

the Late Capitalist Museum’, October, liv (Fall 1990), pp. 3–17.

39 Latryl Ohendalski, ‘Kimbell Museum to Be Friendly Home, Says Kahn’, Fort Worth Press

(4 May 1969); Louis I. Kahn, ‘Space and Inspiration’, 1967 lecture, L’Architecture d’aujour-

d’hui, xl (February–March 1969), pp. 15–16, cited in Patricia Cummings Lord, The Art

Museums of Louis I. Kahn (Durham and London, 1989), p. 115.

40 See Mary McLeod, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism

to Deconstruction’, Assemblage, viii (February 1989); reprinted in Hays, Architecture

Theory, pp. 678–702.

41 David Harvey, ‘Looking Backward on Postmodernism’, in Andreas Papadakis, ed., Post-

Modernism on Trial (London, 1990), p. 12.

42 The Charlottesville Tapes (New York, 1985), pp. 19, 15 – transcripts of a 1982 conference at

the University of Virginia School of Architecture that brought together 25 ‘starchitects’

including Johnson, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Robert A. M. Stern and

Stanley Tigerman.

43 See Reinhold Martin, ‘Architecture’s Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern?’,

gr, xxii (Winter 2005), pp. 6–29.

chapter seven: Disjunctives and Alternatives, 1985 to the Present

1 John Logan and Harvey Moloteh, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place

(Berkeley, ca, 1987); Alan Altshuler, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public


Investment (Washington, dc, and Cambridge, ma, 2003); Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice

Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World (London, 2005).

2 Greg Lynn’s manifestos, Folds, Bodies and Blobs: Collected Essays (Brussels, 1998) and

Animate Form (New York, 1999), promoted blobs. Reed Kroloff refined the terminology,

with later comments by William Safire (‘On Language: Defenestration’, New York Times,

1 December 2002).

3 ‘Daring Modernist Homes on the Cheap’, Business Week (18 June 2002).

4 shop/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli, guest eds, Versioning: Evolutionary Techniques in

Architecture, special issue of a.d., lxxii (September–October 2002).

5 Key works include David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture

(Cambridge, ma, 2002); Toshiko Mori, ed., Immaterial/Ultramaterial (New York, 2002).

6 Wigley acknowledged Aaron Betsky’s telling phrase, which became the basis for Betsky’s

Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern (New York, 1990).

Also see Bernard Tschumi, ‘Disjunctions’ (1987), in Architecture and Disjunction

(Cambridge, ma, 1996).

7 See Steven Harris and Deborah Berke, eds, Architecture of the Everyday (New York, 1997);

John Chase, Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski, eds, Everyday Urbanism (New York,

1999); the work of Venturi Scott Brown, especially A View from the Campidoglio (New

York, 1984); and renewed interest in J. B. Jackson, whose influence is summarized in

Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after

J. B. Jackson (Berkeley, ca, 2003).

8 Recent explorations seek to bridge the two realms, notably Vicky Richardson, New

Vernacular Architecture (New York, 2001); Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds,

Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, the Built Environment (Stanford, 2005).

9 This only accentuates the need to engage questions of identity in today’s world. See

Chris Abel, Architecture and Identity (London, 1997); Dolores Hayden, The Power of

Place: Urban Landscapes as Public Culture (Cambridge, ma, 1995); Albert Borgmann,

Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago, 1993).

10 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’ (1955); reprinted in History

and Truth (Evanston, 1965), cited in Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’,

in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic [1983] (New York, 1998), p. 18, and several later

versions of this essay.

11 Among the best discussions of the issue are Vincent B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural

Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition (New York,

2007), which includes Frampton’s essay; Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical

Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich and New York, 2003).

12 Joel Garreau’s book, Edge City: The New Frontier, appeared in 1992 as the phenomenon

was in decline.

13 Joel Warren Barna, The See-Through Years: Creation and Destruction in Texas

Architecture and Real Estate, 1981–1991 (Houston, 1992), p. 190.

14 See Robert H. Frank, The Winner-Take-All Society (New York, 1995); Arlie Hochschild,

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home, and Home Becomes Work (New York, 1997);

Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work (Cambridge, 2000).

15 Stephen Zacks, ‘The dna of Science Labs’, Metropolis, xxvi (February 2007), p. 79.

16 An article about Behnische’s Genzyme Center receiving a 2006 bw/ar award noted that

58 per cent of the employees reported that they were more productive there than in the

previous building: ‘Genzyme Center’, ar, cxciv (November 2006), p. 102.

17 Sarah Williams Goldhagen rightly critiques the focus on bravura and deferred main-

tenance in ‘American Collapse’, The New Republic (27 August 2007), pp. 26–32.

18 Wes Jones, Instrumental Forms (New York, 1998), esp. pp. 70–73. On infrastructure, also

2 9 6

see Richard Datner, Civil Architecture: The New Public Infrastructure (New York, 1995);

Brian Hayes, Infrastructure (New York, 2005); David E. Miller, Toward a New Regionalism:

Environmental Architecture in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, 2005).

19 Susan Susanka’s popular book launched a little empire with Inside the Not So Big House,

Outside It and even The Not So Big Life.

20 Tony Favro, ‘Affordable Housing Crisis Casts a Shadow over the American Dream’,

City Mayors Society (9 March 2007), p. 1.

21 Data from www.ekekt.com, cited in Praxis, iii, special Housing Tactics issue (2001), p. 15.

22 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

(New York, 1992), shows the historical flaws in these fantasies.

23 Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian, Housing As If People Mattered (Berkeley,

ca, 1986); Karen A. Franck and Sherry Ahrentzen, eds, New Households, New Housing

(New York, 1989); Joan Forrester Sprague, More Than Housing: Lifeboats for Women and

Children (Boston, ma, 1991).

24 Susannah Hagan, ‘Five Reasons to Adopt Environmental Design’, Harvard Design

Magazine, xviii (Spring–Summer 2003), p. 5.

25 Personal communication with Sam Grawe, 22 June 2007.

26 American Dream: The Houses at Sagaponac (New York, 2003).

27 John Dutton, New American Urbanism (Milan, 2000); Peter Calthorpe and William

Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington, dc, 2001).

28 For an overview of many such efforts, see Bryan Bell, ed., Good Deeds, Good Design:

Community Service through Architecture (New York, 2004). Habitat for Humanity has

built more than 100,000 houses in the us and a comparable number abroad. This faith-

based organization, founded in 1976 in Americus, Georgia, relies on sweat equity and

volunteer labour. While the goals and bonding experience are commendable, the stylis-

tic idiom and environmental politics are not. Some local architects have negotiated a

more engaging contemporary style, for example, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen’s

ten-house enclave in Seattle (2004).

29 Koning Eizenberg Architects, Architecture Isn’t Just for Special Occasions (New York,

2006), p. 32.

30 Jayne Merkel, ‘Fine Tuning’, in Lucy Bullivant, ed., Home Front: New Developments in

Housing (London, 2003), pp. 70–81.

31 Karen E. Steen, ‘Hail to the Chief ’, Metropolis (January 2002), p. 44.

32 See Steven Flanders, ed., Celebrating the Courthouse (New York, 2005), esp. Nathan

Glazer’s epilogue, ‘Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Federal Architecture’, about the New

York Senator’s passion for reform.

33 B. Joseph Fine ii, and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and

Every Business a Stage (Boston, ma, 1999), originally a 1998 article in Harvard Business

Review. Cited in Sandy Isenstadt, ‘Recurring Surfaces: Architecture in the Experience

Economy’, in Annmarie Brennan and Brendan Moran, eds, Resurfacing Modernism:

Perspecta 32 (Cambridge, ma, 2001), pp. 108–19. Also see Ann Bergren, ‘Jon Jerde and

the Architecture of Pleasure’, Assemblage, xxxvii (1998), pp. 8–33.

34 Steve Litt, ‘uc x 3’, Metropolis (February 2005), p. 106.

35 ‘William Bruder: New Phoenix Central Library’, a+u, cccxxi (June 1997), pp. 60–73.


2 9 8

This selection does not include readily available monographs on individual architects,

buildings or cities.

Abu-Lughod, Janet, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities

(Minneapolis, 1999)

Albrecht, Donald, ed., World War ii and the American Dream: How Wartime Building

Changed a Nation (Washington, dc, and Cambridge, ma, 1995)

–– and Chrysanthe B. Broikos, eds, On the Job: Design and the American Office (New York,

2000)

Alofsin, Anthony, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture and

City Planning at Harvard (New York, 2002)

Archer, John, Architecture and Suburbia (Minneapolis, 2005)

Baird, George, The Space of Appearance (Cambridge, ma, 1995)

Banham, Reyner, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment [1969] (Chicago, 1984)

––, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London and Baltimore, 1971)

––, A Concrete Atlantis: us Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture

(Cambridge, ma, 1986)

––, A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, ed. Mary Banham, Paul Barker, Sutherland

Lyall and Cedric Price (Berkeley, ca, 1996)

Barna, Joel Warren, The See-Through Years: Creation and Destruction in Texas

Architecture and Real Estate, 1981–1991 (Houston, 1992)

Baumann, John, Roger Biles and Kristin Szylvian, eds, From Tenements to the Taylor

Homes: In Search of Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America

(University Park, pa, 2000)

Beauregard, Robert A., Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of us Cities [1991] (New

York, 2003)

––, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis, 2006)

Bell, Michael, and Sze Tsung Leong, eds, Slow Space (New York, 1998)

Bender, Thomas, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York,

2002)

Berkeley, Ellen Perry, and Matilda McQuaid, Architecture: A Place for Women

(Washington, dc, 1989)

Blake, Peter, No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept (New

York, 1993)

Select Bibliography

Bluestone, Daniel, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, 1991)

Boyer, M. Christine, Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style, 1850–1900 (New York,

1985)

––, The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge, ma, 1994)

Braham, William W., and Jonathan A. Hale, eds, Rethinking Technology: A Reader in

Architectural Theory (New York and London, 2007)

Brennan, Annmarie, and Brendan Moran, eds, Resurfacing Modernism: Perspecta 32


Bridge, Gary, and Sophie Watson, eds, A Companion to the City (London and Boston,

ma, 2000)

Bruegmann, Robert, ed., Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of The United

States Air Force Academy (Chicago, 1994)

Burchard, John, and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and

Cultural History (Boston, ma, 1961)

Burke, Peter, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, pa, 1991)

Burns, Carol J., and Andrea Kahn, eds, Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and

Strategies (London and New York, 2005)

Canclini, Néstor Garciá, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural

Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis, 2001)

Canizaro, Vincent, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity,

Modernity and Tradition (New York, 2007)

Chase, John, Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the

Vernacular City (New York, 2002)

––, Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski, eds, Everyday Urbanism (New York, 1999)

Clausen, Meredith L., The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream


Ciucci, Giorgio, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Marieri-Elia and Manfredo Tafuri, The American

City: From the Civil War to the New Deal, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta [1973]


Cody, Jeffrey, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (London and New York, 2003)

Cohen, Jean-Louis, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and The

American Challenge, 1893–1960 (Paris, 1995)

Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar

America (New York, 2003)

Colomina, Beatriz, Annmarie Brennan and Melanie Kim, eds, Cold War Hothouses: Inventing

Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy (New York, 2004)

Conn, Steven, and Max Page, eds, Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their

Architecture, Their Cities and Their Landscape (Philadelphia, 2003)

Conzen, Michael, ed., The Making of the American Landscape (London and New York, 1994)

Craig, Lois, and Staff of the Federal Architecture Project, The Federal Presence: Archi-

tecture, Politics and Symbols in United States Government Building (Cambridge,

ma, 1978)

Creese, Walter, Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings

(Princeton, 1986)

Crysler, C. Greig, Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built

Environment (New York and London, 2003)

Cuff, Dana, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, ma, 1991)

––, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, ma,

2000)

Cullingworth, Barry, Planning in the usa: Policies, Issues and Processes (New York, 1997)

2 9 9 S e l e c t B i b l i o g ra p h y

Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London and New York,

1990)

Dutton, Thomas, and Lian Hurst Mann, eds, Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses

and Social Practices (Minneapolis, 1997)

Easterling, Keller, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America


Eggener, Keith, ed., American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader (New York and

London, 2006)

Ellin, Nan, Postmodern Urbanism (Oxford, 1996)

––, ed., The Architecture of Fear (New York, 1997)

Filler, Martin, Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New

York, 2007)

Findley, John, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley, ca,

1992)

Fishman, Robert, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbs (New York, 1987)

Fitch, James Marston, American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It [1948]

(New York, 1999)

––, James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation and the Built

Environment, ed. Martica Sawain (New York, 2007)

Fogelson, Robert, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, 2001)

Foner, Eric, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York, 2002)

Ford, Larry R., Cities and Buildings (Baltimore, 1994)

Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture: A Critical History [1980] (London and New York,

2007)

––, American Masterworks: The Twentieth-Century House (New York, 1995)

Friedman, Alice T., Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural

History (New York, 1998)

Galison, Peter, and Emily Thompson, eds, The Architecture of Science (Cambridge, ma, 1999)

Garvin, Alexander, The American City (New York, 1996)

Ghirardo, Diane, Architecture after Modernism (London and New York, 1996)

––, ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle, 1991)

Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History

(New York, 1948)

Glazer, Nathan, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American

City (Princeton, 2007)

Goldhagen, Sarah Williams, and Réan Legault, eds, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in

Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge, ma, 2001)

Gordon, Alastair, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary

Structure (New York, 2004)

Gottdiener, Mark, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed

Environments (Cambridge, ma, 2001)

Gowans, Alan, Styles and Types of North American Architecture: Social Functions and Cultural

Expressions (New York, 1992)

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures,

Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London and New York, 2002)

Groth, Paul, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley,

ca, 1994)

Hamlin, Talbot, ed., Forms and Functions of Modern Architecture, 4 vols (New York, 1952)

Handlin, David P., The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815–1915 (Boston, ma, 1979)

––, American Architecture (London and New York, 2004)

3 0 0

Harpman, Louise, and Evan M. Supcoff, eds, Settlement Patterns: Perspecta 30 (Cambridge,

ma, 1999)

Harris, Neil, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America

(Chicago, 1990)

––, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven, 1999)

––, ‘Architecture and the Corporation’, in Carl Kaysen, ed., The American Corporation Today

(New York, 1996), pp. 436–86

Harris, Steven, and Deborah Berke, eds, Architecture of the Everyday (New York, 1997)

Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1990)

––, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, ca, 2000)

Hayden, Dolores, Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing and Family Life (New York,

2002)

––, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York, 2003)

Hays, K. Michael, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, ma, 1998)

Hess, Alan, Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (San Francisco, 2004)

––, Organic Architecture: The Other Modernism (Salt Lake City, 2006)

Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, ma, 1999)

Hise, Greg, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis

(Baltimore, 1997)

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Jr, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration [1929]

(New York, 1993)

––, and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 [1932] (reprinted with

‘The International Style Forty Years Later’, New York, 1966)

Hughes, Thomas, and Agatha Hughes, eds, Lewis Mumford, Public Intellectual (New York,

1990)

Hurly, Andrew, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in

Postwar Consumer Culture (New York, 2001)

Huxtable, Ada Louise, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? [1970] (Berkeley, ca, 1989)

––, Kicked a Building Lately? [1976] (Berkeley, ca, 1988)

––, The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (New York, 1984)

––, Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New York, 1997)

Isenstadt, Sandy, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity

(Cambridge and New York, 2006)

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Lefkowitz

Horowitz (New Haven, 1997)

Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961)

Jandl, H. Ward, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow (Washington, dc, 1991)

Jarzombek, Mark, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, History (Cambridge and

New York, 2000)

Jencks, Charles, The Language of Postmodern Architecture [1977] (New York, 1984)

Jordy, William H., American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. iii, Progressive and Academic

Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century; vol. iv, The Impact of European Modernism

in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Garden City, ny, 1972)

––, ‘Symbolic Essence’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture, ed.

Mardges Bacon (New Haven, 2005)

Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan [1978] (New York,

1994)

Larson, Magali Sarfatti, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, ca, 1977)

––, Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth Century America

(Berkeley, ca, 1993)


Leatherbarrow, David, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography


Liebs, Chester, Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (Boston, ma, 1985)

Longstreth, Richard, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile and Retailing

in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, ma, 1997)

––, The Drive-in, the Supermarket and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles,

1914–1941 (Cambridge, ma, 1999)

Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge, ma, 1960)

MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair, ed., The Architectural Historian in America (Washington, dc,

1990)

Macrae-Gibson, Gavin, The Secret Life of Buildings: An American Mythology for Modern

Architecture (Cambridge, ma, 1985)

Macy, Christine, and Sarah Bonnemaison, Architecture and Nature: Creating the American

Landscape (London and New York, 2003)

Marder, Tod, ed., The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge,

ma, 1985)

Margolies, John, Home Away from Home: Motels in America (Boston, ma, 1995)

Marot, Sébastien, Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory (London, 2003)

Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space


McCoy, Esther, Five California Architects (New York, 1960)

––, The Second Generation (Salt Lake City, 1984)

McLeod, Mary, ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to

Deconstructivism’, Assemblage, viii (February 1989), pp. 23–59

Meikle, Jeffrey, Twentieth-Century Limited: Industrial Design in America (Philadelphia, 1979)

Miller, David, Toward a New Regionalism: Environmental Architecture in the Pacific Northwest

(Seattle, 2005)

Mock, Elizabeth, What is Modern Architecture? (New York, 1942)

––, Built in usa: Since 1932 (New York, 1945)

––, Modern Gardens and the Landscape (New York, 1964)

Moskowitz, Marina, Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class (Baltimore, 2004)

Moudry, Roberta, ed., The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York, 2005)

Mumford, Eric, ‘The “Tower in a Park” in America: Theory and Practice, 1920–1960’, Planning

Perspectives, x (1995), pp. 17–41

Mumford, Lewis, ed., Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York, 1959)

––, The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. Donald L. Miller (New York, 1986)

Nesbitt, Kate, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural

Theory, 1965–1995 (New York, 1996)

Noble, David W., Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism

(Minneapolis, 2002)

Nye, David, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, ma, 1994)

Ockman, Joan, and Edward Eigen, eds, Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary

Anthology (New York, 1993)

Page, Max, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago, 1999)

––, and Randall Mason, eds, Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in

the United States (London and New York, 2004)

Pai, Hyungmin, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse and Modernity in

America (Cambridge, ma, 2002)

Radford, Gail, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago,

1996)

3 0 2

Ransom, Harry S., ed., The People’s Architects (Chicago, 1964)

Rowe, Peter G., Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, ma, 1991)

––, Modernity and Housing (Cambridge, ma, 1993)

Scardino, Barrie, William F. Stern and Bruce C. Webb, eds, Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at

Houston (Austin, 2003)

Scott, Felicity, Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, ma, 2007)

Schwarzer, Mitchell, ‘Modern Architectural Ideology in Cold War America’, in Martha Pollak,

ed., The Education of the Architect (Cambridge, ma, 1997), pp. 87–109

––, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York, 2004)

Scully, Vincent, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York, 1969)

––, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, ed. Neil Levine (Princeton, 2003)

Serraino, Pierluigi, Modernism Rediscovered: The Photography of Julius Shulman (Cologne and

New York, 2000)

––, NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism (San Francisco, 2006)

Sies, Mary Corbin, and Christopher Silver, eds, Planning the Twentieth-Century American City

(Baltimore, 1996)

Smith, C. Ray, Supermannerism: New Attitudes in Post-Modern Architecture

(New York, 1977)

Smith, Terry, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago, 1993)

Somol, R. E., ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (New York,

1997)

Sorkin, Michael, Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings (New York, 1991)

––, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes from the New American City and the End of Public

Space (New York, 1992)

Stern, Robert A. M., New Directions in American Architecture [1967] (New York, 1977)

Taylor, William, ed., Inventing Times Square: Culture and Commerce at the Crossroads of the

World (New York, 1996)

Torre, Susana, ed., Women in American Architecture (New York, 1977)

Treib, Marc, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster (Berkeley, ca, 1995)

––, ed., Modern Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, ma, 1993)

Tzonis, Alexander, Liane Lefaivre and Richard Diamond, Architecture in North America since

1960 (Boston, ma, 1995)

Upton, Dell, Architecture in the United States (New York and Oxford, 1998)

Vale, Lawrence, and Sam Bass Warner, Imagining the City (New Brunswick, nj, 2001)

Van Leeuwen, Thomas A. P., The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American

Skyscraper [1986] (Cambridge, ma, 1988)

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas


––, and Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953–1984 (New

York, 1984)

Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, ma,

1992)

Waldheim, Charles, The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York, 2006)

––, and Katerina Rüedi Ray, eds, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives

(Chicago, 2005)

Whitaker, Craig, Architecture and the American Dream (New York, 1996)

Willis, Carol, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New

York, 1995)

Wilson, Alexander, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the

Exxon Valdez (New York, 1992)


Wilson, Chris and Paul Groth, eds, Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after

J. B. Jackson (Berkeley, ca, 2003)

Wilson, Richard Guy, and Sidney Robinson, eds, Modern Architecture in America (Ames, ia,

1991)

Wines, James, Green Architecture (Cologne, 2000)

Wolf, Peter M., Land in America: Its Value, Use and Control (New York, 1981)

Wright, Gwendolyn, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New

York, 1981)

––, and Janet Parks, eds, The History of History in American Schools of Architecture (New

York, 1990)

––, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago,

1873–1973 (Chicago, 1980)

Zukin, Sharon, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disneyland (Berkeley, ca, 1991)

––, The Culture of Cities (Oxford and Cambridge, ma, 1995)

Zukowsky, John, ed., Chicago and New York: Architectural Interactions (Chicago, 1984)

3 0 4

3 0 5

I have lived with this book for four intense years, although several friends have recognized

that it evolved throughout the course of my career. Vivian Constantinopoulos at Reaktion

Books has been a remarkable editor. She conceived of the ‘modern architectures in history’

series, an inspired idea, and helped me conceptualize a book that engages the breadth, ambi-

guities and power of architecture in the usa. Everyone at Reaktion Books has been extremely

helpful. A fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation helped initiate the project. The

Graham Foundation and Wolfsonian Foundation provided assistance for illustrations, as did

the Beverly Willis Foundation, where Wanda Bubriski and Beverly Willis have been especial-

ly helpful.

The text has benefited from many friends and colleagues. Robert Beauregard, Robert

Bruegmann, Kenneth Frampton, RoseLee Goldberg, Sandy Isenstadt, Richard Longstreth,

Reinhold Martin, Felicity Scott and Kate Solomonson have read sections and offered valu-

able advice. I have also drawn much from conversations with Frances Anderton, Jean-Louis

Cohen, Julie Eizenberg, Diane Ghirardo, Rosanne Haggerty, Laurie Hawkinson, Chiu Yin

Wong Hempel, Alan Hess, Hilde Heynen, Thomas Hine, Mark Jarzombek, James

Kloppenberg, Hank Koning, Jean-François Lejeune, Mary Miss, Robert Stern, Tony Vidler,

and the late Jacqueline Tatom. This synthesis began with the Preston Thomas Lectures at

Cornell. Yale, Harvard, Washington University, the University of Washington, the University

of Texas, the University of California at Berkeley and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced

Study helped clarify my ideas.

Irene Cheng has been an indispensable help. She not only tracked down illustrations but

sharpened my eye about visual continuities and uncanny surprises in various cultural media.

Other students at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

have tested my speculations with perspicacity, especially Hyun Tae Jung and Inderbir Riar.

Hannah Ilten helped in innumerable ways, not least of which her always cheery disposition.

Several libraries and photographic collections have been indispensable resources, espe-

cially Julie Tozer at Columbia University’s Avery Library and C. Ford Peatross at the Library

of Congress who shared his historical sensibility together with a magisterial archive. Special

thanks to Erica Stoller and Christine Cordazzo at Esto, Erin Tikovitsch at the Chicago

History Museum, Julio Sims and Anne Blecksmith at the Getty Research Center, William

Whitaker at the University of Pennsylvania Architecture Library, Pat Ezzell at the Tennessee

Valley Authority Archives, Patrick Lemelle at the Institute of Texas Cultures, Nancy Sparrow

at the University of Texas Libraries, Erik Pepple at the Wexner Center and Crystal Zuelke at

the Las Vegas News Bureau. Diana Agrest, Steve Badanes, Min Fung, Craig Hodgetts, Jake

Gorst, Donlyn Lyndon, Richard Payne, Stanley Saitowitz and James Wines have been espe-

cially generous.

I learned a great deal from the experience of five wonderful years with the pbs series

‘History Detectives’. In particular Chris Bryson, executive producer at Lion tv, illuminated

new ways to use visual material and think about the nature of evidence for overlapping kinds

of enquiries. The experience affirmed my belief that a wide spectrum of the public cares

about the exciting processes of history.

Acknowledgements

My family tolerated my obsessions with this book while sharing myriad pleasures that

enriched my life. David has given me wise insights about the role of history in cultural

conflicts. Sophia’s linguistic gifts are an inspiration, as is her palpable delight in all kinds

of learning. My husband, Thomas Bender, has been remarkably patient and supportive. I

have drawn from his appreciation for the richness of American history and his commit-

ment to greater justice and beauty in today’s cities. This book is dedicated to him.

3 0 6

3 0 7

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative

material and/or permission to reproduce it.

Photo Peter Aaron©Esto: p. 251 (foot); photo Berenice Abbott (courtesy of the Museum of the

City of New York): p. 107; courtesy of Agrest/Gandelsonas Architects: p. 261; The American

Institute of Architects Library and Archives, Washington, dc: p. 172; from The Architect (July

1918): p. 60; The Art Institute of Chicago (Bruce Goff Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Archives)

– reproduction © the Art Institute of Chicago: p. 144; courtesy of Asymptote: p. 245; from

Atterbury, The Economic Production of Workingmen’s Homes (1930): p. 70 (top); courtesy of

Avery Library, Columbia University: p. 117 (top); axa Equitable Life Insurance Company: p. 20;

© Steve Badanes: p. 221 (top); photo Donald Barthelme, from Aluminum in Architecture (Special

Collections, University of Houston Libraries, Courtesy of the Estate of Donald Barthelme, Sr):

p. 190; photo Jordi Bernardó: p. 177; photo Ruth M. Bernhard (courtesy of the Kiesler Archive):

p. 110 (foot); photo Leslie W. Bland (utsa Institute of Texan Cultures, courtesy of City Public

Service Company Collection): p. 136; photo Michael Bodycomb, © Kimbell Museum of Art,

Fort Worth, Texas: p. 232 (top); courtesy of Max Bond/Davis Brody Bond Associates: p. 228;

photo Tom Bonner, courtesy of Holt Hinshaw: p. 246 (foot); photo Jack Boucher, Library of

Congress, Washington, dc: p. 120; photo Ernie Braun, courtesy of the Eichler Network

Archives: p. 168; photo courtesy of Judith Bromley: p. 34 (middle); courtesy of Will Bruder +

Partners: p. 272 (foot); courtesy of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller: p. 102; courtesy

Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society: p. 59; California State Library: p. 33; courtesy of

Caudill Rowlett Scott: p. 138; photo Benny Chan/Fotoworks: p. 258; collection of Irene

”University Library Archives (Joseph Urban Papers): p. 108; photo Will Connell (Department

of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, ucla): p. 106 (foot); from The

Craftsman (1916): p. 62; courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro: p. 267; courtesy of Eisenman Architects:

pp. 197, 265; Ford Powell Carson, Architects: p. 165; from Fortune magazine (July 1964): p. 227;

courtesy of the Fountainbleau Hilton: p. 185; photo © Joshua Freiwald: p. 214; photo Clarence

Fuermann (courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York): p. 58; courtesy Good

Housekeeping: p. 174; photo Jonathan Green, 1976: p. 224 (foot); photo Art Grice, courtesy of

Miller/Hull Partnership: p. 263; photo Tim Griffith, courtesy of Stanley Saitowitz Architects:

p. 255; Gruen Associates: p. 184; frontispiece from Edward Everett Hale, Workingmen’s Homes

(1874): p. 30; photo Jim Hedrich, © Hedrich Blessing: p. 243; photo Ken Hedrich (courtesy of

the Chicago History Museum): p. 93; photos Hedrich Blessing, courtesy of Chicago History

Museum: p. 140; photo Ted Hendrickson, courtesy of Connecticut College: p. 130; from the

Henry Ford Collection, Detroit: p. 56; Hewitt & Garrison Architectural Photography: p. 251

(top); Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Medium Photo Collection): p. 19; photo

© Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer & Associates (courtesy of H3 and Holzman Moss): p. 223 (right);

photo courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, dc: p. 198; photos courtesy of Hodgetts + Fung: pp. 225, 271; courtesy of Steven

Holl Architects: p. 273; photo Robert Huntzinger from Fortune (October 1964): p. 150; photos

© Timothy Hursley: p. 216 (top), 257, 274; from Industrial Chicago (1891), courtesy of the

Photo Acknowledgements

3 0 8

Chicago History Museum: p. 36; Inland Architect and News Record (1891), courtesy of Avery

Library, Columbia University: p. 21; courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Trust – used with permission

– Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute: pp.

26, 96 (top), 131, 158, 164, 169, 170, 192; courtesy of Jon Jerde Partnership: p. 264; courtesy of

Jones Studio, Phoenix: p. 252; courtesy Albert Kahn Associates: p. 57; courtesy of Louis I. Kahn

Collection, University of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum

Commission: p. 232 (middle); photo William Keck, courtesy of Robert Boyce: p. 128; courtesy

of the Kiesler Archive: p. 110; from Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1979), courtesy of Office

for Metropolitan Architecture: p. 77; photo Balthazar Korab: p. 229 (top); photo Rollin La

France (© Venturi Scott Brown & Associates): p. 218 (top and middle), 221 (top); from Clay

Lancaster, The American Bungalow, compiled from Henry Saylor’s Bungalows (1911; © Dover

Publications): p. 69 (top); Las Vegas News Bureau: p. 186; photo Robert Lautman, Library of

Congress, Washington, dc: p. 178; courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, dc (Prints

& Photographs Division): pp. 23, 109, 112 (wpa Poster Collection), 134, 146; Library of Congress,

Washington, dc (habs Collection): p. 28 (top right; photo Jet Lowe), 34 (top), 121; photo Chip

Lord (courtesy of University of California Berkeley Art Museum): p. 199; Los Angeles Public

Library (Security Pacific Collection): p. 100; photo Ted McCrea, Missouri Historical Society, St

Louis: p. 180; photo Fred W. McDarrah: p. 155; photos © Norman McGrath: pp. 215, 223 (left);

photo Herb McLaughlin (courtesy of Herb and Dorothy McLaughlin Collection, Arizona State

University Libraries): p. 139 (top); photo Man Ray (courtesy of the Harwell Harris Collection,

The Alexander Architectural Archive, The University of Texas Libraries, © Man Ray Trust/

adagp, Paris, and dacs, London, 2007): p. 125; courtesy of Claude Stoller/Marquis & Stoller

Architects: p. 179; photo Jack Massey (courtesy of the Stanford University Fuller Archive): p. 182;

photo Robert E. Mates, © the Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation, New York: p. 188; from

Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926): p. 55; courtesy of MetLife

Archives: p. 24; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: p. 78, 92 (Ford Motor Company

Collection); Julius Michele, courtesy of mta Bridges and Tunnels Special Archive: p. 118;

Minnesota Historical Society: p. 189; photo Joseph Molitor (courtesy of Avery Library, Columbia

University, Joseph Molitor Archive): p. 207; photo Michael Moran (courtesy of Tod Williams +

Billie Tsien): p. 269; courtesy of Murphy/Jahn: p. 262; Museum of Modern Art, New York:

pp. 101 (gift of Mr and Mrs Water Hochschild, photo © 1995 Museum of Modern Art, New

York), 106 (top); photo © 1995 Museum of Modern Art, New York: p. 101; Museum of Modern

Art, New York: p. 106 (top); photo Museum of the City of New York: p. 16 (J. Clarence Davies

Collection); photo © Karen Neal/American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.: p. 246 (top); from

Richard Neutra, Amerika, Die stilbildung des neuen Bauens in den Vereinigten Staaten (1930): p.

99; courtesy of the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society: p. 14; courtesy of New York

City Department of Parks and Recreation photoarchive: p. 117 (foot); photo courtesy of the

New-York Historical Society: p. 38 (Harper’s Magazine, 1889); New York Public Library: pp. 50

(Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs),

90 (Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); photo

Richard Nickel (courtesy of Richard Nickel Committee, Chicago, Illinois): p. 176 (top); photo

Margaret Olin, courtesy of Bernard Maybeck: p. 65 (foot); photos Olmsted National Historic

Site: pp. 29, 37; photo Richard Payne, faia: p. 206; Pennsylvania State University Library, Dept of

Special Collections (George C. Izenour Archive): p. 43; Philadelphia Museum of Art (Louise

and Walter Arensberg Collection), photo Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection Archives (©

ars, ny, and dacs, London, 2007): p. 49; courtesy of Antoine Predock: p. 216 (foot); courtesy

of Pugh + Scarpa: p. 259; photo Ken Raveill, ©Terrell Publishing Co.: p. 234; Reibsmen Nickels

and Rex Collection: p. 183; photos Cervin Robinson: pp. 23, 27 (top left); photo © Kevin Roche

John Dinkeloo and Associates: p. 203; photo Paul Rocheleau: p. 124 (top); Steve Rosenthal, 1977,

courtesy of John Sharratt Associates: p. 213; San Diego Historical Society: pp. 67, 73; Sandak,

3 0 9 P h o t o A c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s

Inc. – reproduced by permission of the University of Georgia: p. 65 (top); courtesy of Sandy &

BabcockSB Architects: p. 194; photo Ben Schnall (Lescaze Archives, Special Collections

Research Center, Syracuse University): p. 87; from Scientific American: pp. 42 (1884), 75 (1912);

from Second Homes magazine (courtesy of Jake Gorst): p. 181; photo C. Segerbloom for the

Bureau of Reclamation: p. 14; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska – Lincoln

(F. M. Hall Collection): p. 9; photo Julius Shulman, from Deutsche Bauzeitung (November

1966): p. 220; © site: p. 200; photo courtesy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: p. 224 (top); photo

Craig Smith for the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture: p. 241; courtesy W. Eugene Smith: p. 172;

courtesy of som Archives and Hyun Tae Jung: p. 147; courtesy of Sony Pictures: p. 176 (top);

State Library of Louisiana, Baton Rouge (Louisiana Collection): p. 116; photos Ezra Stoller©

Esto: p. 139 (foot), 157, 160, 162, 163, 166 (top), 173, 187, 191, 209, 219, 232 (foot); Stone-Day

Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut: p. 31; photo Roger Strauss©Esto: p. 125; photo Timothy

Street-Porter©Esto: p. 221 (foot); courtesy of Studio Completiva, Denver, Colorado: p. 254;

courtesy of Tennessee Valley Authority Archives: p. 119; Time Magazine, ©1936, 1949, 1952, 1963,

1964, 1979 – Time Inc. – reprinted by permission: pp. 12–13; photo Bill Timmerman (courtesy

of Will Bruder + Partners): p. 272 (top); photo Judith Turner, courtesy of Smith-Miller +

Hawkinson: p. 238; U.C. Santa Barbara University Museum Architecture and Design Collection:

p. 96 (foot), 98; University of Arkansas Library, Fayetteville, Arkansas (Fay Jones Collection,

Special Collections): p. 233; courtesy of the University of Chicago Press: p. 81; photo © Venturi

Scott Brown & Associates: p. 218 (foot); The Wainwright Building, promotional brochure pub-

lished by the Wainwright Real Estate Company, St Louis: p. 27 (top right); courtesy of William

Massie Architects: p. 236; photo William Watkins (©Venturi Scott Brown & Associates): p. 210;

from Western Architect, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago: p. 69 (foot); photos Gwendolyn

Wright: p. 70 (foot), 74, 133 (foot); courtesy of Yale University Library (Saarinen Archive): p. 137

(top); © Mitsu Yasukawa/Corbis: p. 249; from Alfred Yeomans, City Residential Land Development

(1916), courtesy of Avery Library, Columbia University): p. 72.

Ackerman, Frederick 80, 82, 101, 102, 134

Adler & Sullivan 27–8, 27, 40, 43–4, 43

Agrest/Gandelsonas 260, 261

Ahlschlager, Walter 88–9, 88

Ain, Gregory 127, 130–31, 131

Alabama, Harris House, Mason’s Bend 256,

257

Ambasz, Emilio 207

American Institute of Architects (aia) 19, 79,

103, 168, 172, 204, 241

Anshen & Allen 172

Ant Farm 199, 199

Architectural Forum Awards 172

Arizona

Arcosanti 200–1, 252

Arizona School 252

Environmental Showcase Home, Phoenix

252, 252

migrant workers’ housing, Chandler 134,

135

Phoenix Central Library 270, 272

Public Art Master Plan, Phoenix 240

Sandra Day O’Connor Courthouse,

Phoenix 261

Solid Waste Treatment Facility, Phoenix

241

Taliesin West 138–9, 139, 149, 252

Arkansas, Thorncrown Chapel 231–3, 233

Armstrong, Harris 127, 157

Arquitectonica 214, 214

Arts & Architecture Case Study Program 170,

171, 250

Asymptote 244, 245

Atlanta

City Hall 85

High Museum 230

Martin Luther King Jr Center 227, 228

Peachtree Center 202–4

Sweet Auburn district 108, 227

Atterbury, Grosvenor 70, 71

Atwood, Charles 25, 25

Baer, Steve 199

Bang, Lars 174, 174

Barnes, Edward 174, 190

Barney, Carol Ross 261

Barragán, Luis 243

Barthelme, Donald 188, 190

Basset, Chuck 159

Bateman & Johnson 55, 55

Bauer, Catherine 83–4, 114, 132, 145, 148

Baum, L. Frank 41

Beckett, Welton 184

Beecher, Catharine 30–31, 31

Bell, Michael 256

Belluschi, Pietro 127, 145, 158–9, 158, 172, 191

Beman, Solon 61

Black & Veatch 241

bnim 243–4

Bok, Edward 64

Bond Ryder James 227, 228

Boston 39, 50, 164

Back Bay Fens Park 37, 39

City Hall 225–6, 227

Ford Hall 75

Government Center 154

John Hancock Tower 205

Museum of Contemporary Arts 267

Prudential Center 154

Villa Victoria 211, 212–13

Breuer, Marcel 6, 125–7, 125, 145, 152, 191, 211

Bridgman, Lillian 66

3 1 0

Index

3 1 1 I n d ex

Brooks, Peter and Shephard 22–3, 23

Brown, Archibald M. 134

Brown, Catherine 240

Bruder, Will 252, 270, 272

Bubble House 130

Bunshaft, Gordon 157, 159

Burgee, John 205, 206

Burnette, Wendell 252

Burnham, Daniel 19, 22–5, 25, 44, 45, 51

bw/ar awards programme 242, 246

Cairns, Burton 134, 135

Caldwell, Alfred 175

California 120, 172, 215, 223

Alice Millard House, Pasadena 101, 101

Apple Computers Building, Cupertinno

244

Biff ’s Coffee Shop, Panorama City 183

Bollman House, Hollywood 101

Camp Parks 143–4, 144

Case Study House #8, Pacific Palisades

170, 171

Channel Heights 145

Colorado Court, Santa Monica 259, 259

Community Church, Garden Grove 191,

192

Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove 191–2

Diamond Ranch High School, Pomona

272–5, 274

Earth Day event, Berkeley 199, 200

First Church of Christ Scientist, Berkeley

74, 74

Foothill College, Los Altos Hills 190

Gamble House, Pasadena 66–7

Gehry House, Santa Monica 220, 221

Harold Way, Santa Monica 257, 258

Havens House, Berkeley 126

Herman Miller Distribution, Rocklin 247

Hill House, La Honda 221

Horton Plaza, San Diego 264, 264

Island Inn, San Diego 250, 251

Kaufmann House, Palm Springs 169–71,

169

Kresge College, uc Santa Cruz 223

Lewis Courts, Sierra Madre 67, 67

Los Angeles see Los Angeles

Lovell Beach House, Newport Beach 98, 98

Marion Olmsted House, San Diego 62

migrant farmworkers’ housing, Indio 213,

213

Oakland Museum 230

St Francis Court, Pasadena 69–71, 69

Salk Institute, La Jolla 166, 167

San Francisco see San Francisco

Schindler-Chace House, Hollywood 96,

97

Sea Ranch 215

Stanford Research Center 164

Stanford University 190

Sunnyvale model house 168

Wayfarers Chapel, Palos Verdes 191

Wednesday Club, San Diego 73

Calthorpe, Peter 253

Candela, Felix 165, 165

Caudill, William 138, 138

Cavaglieri, Giorgio 198

Chicago 22, 35, 36, 52, 75

860–880 Lake Shore Drive 174–5, 176

apartment house 36

Armour Institute 141

Auditorium 43–4, 43

Century of Progress exhibition 127

Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad

headquarters 24

Chicago Daily News Building 86, 86

Chicago Tribune headquarters 84, 85, 85

Dodge engine factory 142

Fair Department Store 21, 21

Hawthorne Works 91–3

Home Insurance Building 21

Hull House 74, 75, 97

Illinois Institute of Technology 6, 140, 141,

270

Inland Steel Building 158, 159

James R. Thompson Center 260, 262

Keck Gottschalk Keck Apartment 128

Marina City 175

Marshall Field Warehouse 28–9, 28, 44

Metropolitan Correctional Center 226

Midway Plaisance 44, 77

model suburb design 71–3, 72

Monadnock Building 22–3, 23

Reliance Building 24–5

Robert Taylor Houses 178

Robie House 64–6, 65

Schlesinger and Meyer Department Store

40, 42

Sears Tower 205–6

Solar Park 127

State of Illinois Center 260, 262

3 1 2

Studebaker Building 61

Transportation Building 45

United Airlines terminal 247

University of Illinois 223, 224

World’s Columbian Exposition 44–5

Childs, David 248, 249

Church, Thomas 161–2, 162, 164

Cincinnati

Carew Tower 88–9, 88

Red Stockings 38–9

Rosenthal Center 266

Shillito’s department store 39

University 268

Clauss, Alfred 105, 106

Colorado

Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs 190

Denver see Denver

Drop City 199, 201

Hoover Dam 14

Prospect Townhomes, Longmont 254

Stapleton brownfield site 253

Colter, Mary 115

Common Ground Community 257

Connecticut

Ansonia High School, Coldspring 138

Harvard boxes, New Canaan 173

House vi, West Cornwall 197

Knights of Columbus headquarters,

New Haven 204

Moto-Home, New London 130, 130

Smith House, Darien 217, 219

Yale University 185, 189–90

Cooper & Eckstut 214

Corbett, Harvey Wiley 80, 89–91, 90, 91, 94–5

Couture, Lise Anne 244, 245

Coxhead, Ernest 66

Craftsman house 68, 68

Croly, Herbert 47, 85, 198

crs (Caudill Rowlett Scott) 189

Cutler, James 250–2, 251

Daub, George 105, 106

Davis & Brody 212

Davison, J. R. 127

Davison, Robert 82, 102, 130

de Blois, Natalie 157, 159

Delano & Aldrich 88

DeMars, Vernon 134, 135

Denver

Airport 247

Art Museum 266

Mile-High Center 154

Red Rocks Amphitheater 136

Design Excellence Program 261

Detroit

Gratiot 175

Guardian Building 85

Lafayette Park 175, 177

Packard’s Building No. 10 55

Renaissance Center 204

Reynolds Metals Office 163

Dewey, John 8, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 62, 75, 106, 138

Diller + Scofidio 267, 267

dingbats 177, 250

d.i.r.t. Studio 247

Dixon, Lawrence Murray 127

Dober, Richard 190

Donovan, John J. 106

Dow, Alden 127, 139

dpz (Duany/Plater-Zyberk) 215–17, 253

Dreyfus, Henry 174

Eames, Charles and Ray 148–9, 148, 170, 171,

193

Eberson, John 108, 109

Eckbo, Garrett 115, 135

Eggert and Higgins 154

Eichler, Joseph 172

Eizenberg, Koning 256–7, 258, 260

Embury, Baum and Weisberg 117–18, 117

Estudio Teddy Cruz 250

Feiner, Edward A. 260–61

Fentress Bradburn Architects 247

Fernau & Hartman 237

Ferriss, Hugh 81, 120

Fisher, Howard 130

Florida

Americana Hotel, Bal Harbor 185

best Rainforest Showroom, Hialeah 200

Cocoon House, Sarasota 173, 173

Florida Tropical Home 127

Miami see Miami

Sarasota High School 188

Seaside 215–17, 253

Virginia Key Beach Park 268, 270

Warm Mineral Springs Motel, Venice 184

Ford, Katherine Morrow 125

Ford, O’Neill 136, 165, 165

Fougeron, Anne 250

3 1 3 I n d ex

Fox & Fowle 248

Frampton, Kenneth 212, 239–40

France 19, 39, 44, 51, 76

Frey, Albert 82, 104, 127

Friday Architects 225

Fuller, R. Buckminster 13, 102, 109, 114, 180–81

domes 181, 182, 201

Dymaxion Deployment Unit 143

Minimum Dymaxion House 102–3, 102,

123, 130

Trade Pavilion, Kabul 182

Furness, Frank 19

Gehry, Frank 235, 236, 244, 245, 250

Deconstructivist Architecture show 238

Gehry House, Santa Monica 220, 221

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 266

Herman Miller Distribution, Rocklin 247

Temporary Contemporary Museum,

Los Angeles 230

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles

268

Weisman Art Museum 234

Geller, Andrew 178, 181

Gensler 237

Germany 54, 75, 141, 181

Gilbert, Cass 61

Gill, Irving 62, 67, 67, 68

Gilman & Kendall 20–21, 20

Giurgula, Romaldo 197, 242

Goff, Bruce 143–4, 144, 174, 250

Goldberg, Bertrand 175

Goodman, Charles 172, 172, 174, 175, 178

Goodman, Percival 191

Goody, Joan 253

Grays 197, 231

Greece 182

Greene, Charles and Henry 66–7

Greenwald, Herbert 174–5, 176

Griffin, Walter Burley 69, 71

Gropius, Walter 6, 125–7, 132, 154

Aluminum City Terrace, New Kensington

145

Athens embassy 182

Fagus Shoe-Last Company, Germany 54

Gropius House, Lincoln 125

‘packaged house’ 130

Gross, Samuel E. 35, 36

Gruen, Victor 183, 184

Gutierrez, Enrique 163

Hadid, Zaha 238, 266

Haglin, Charles 55

Halprin, Ann and Lawrence 175, 197, 227

Harris, Harwell Hamilton 126, 127, 173–4

Harrison & Abramowitz 163, 180, 191, 228

Heineman, Arthur and Alfred 71

Hennebique, François 54

Herzog & de Meuron 266

Hilberseimer, Ludwig 175

Hine, Lewis 50, 50

Hirshen, Sanford 213, 213

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 82, 83, 84, 93, 94,

97–8, 114, 152, 153

Hodgetts + Fung 225, 253, 270, 271

Holabird & Roche 23, 23

Holabird & Root 86, 86, 93, 93

Holl, Steven 198, 217, 250, 253, 266, 270–71, 273

Holt Hinshaw Jones 246, 246

Homsey, Victorine and Samuel 127

Honnold, Douglas 183, 184

Hood, Raymond 83, 86, 89–91, 90, 91, 94, 94

Hood, Walter 268, 270

Houston

Astrodome 228

Bendit House 174, 174

best Indeterminate Façade 200

Gulf Building 85

Menil Collection 266–7

Pennzoil Place 205

Sixteen Houses 256

Texas Medical Center 166

The Woodlands 215

Howard, John Galen 66

Howe & Lescaze 87, 88

Howe, George 87, 88, 145–6, 146, 149

Huff + Gooden 268, 270

Hugman, Robert 136, 136

Huxtable, Ada Louise 198, 201, 207

ibm makeover 165

Illinois

Chicago see Chicago

Coonley House, Riverside 30, 64

Crow Island School, Winnetka 137, 137

Farnsworth House, Plano 173

Francisco Terrace, Oak Park 71

Oak Park 34–5, 34, 64, 71, 74

Riverside 29–30, 29

Trier Center Neighborhood, Winnetka 69

Unity Temple, Oak Park 74

3 1 4

Ward Willitts House, Highland Park 64

Wright House, Oak Park 34–5, 34

India 181

Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,

New York 196–7

Iowa, Alcoa Aluminum Company, Davenport

163

Iraq 182

Isozaki, Arata 230

Israel, Franklin 244

Jackson, Ralph 261

Jacobs, Robert 117, 149

Jahn, Helmut 247, 259, 260, 262

James, William 8, 14, 48, 54, 66

Jencks, Charles 201, 212

Jenney, William LeBaron 21, 21, 30

Jerde, Jon 264–5, 264

Jersey Devil 221

Jimenez, Carlos 247

Johansen, John 229–30, 229

Johnson, Lyndon B. 199, 211, 222, 224–5

Johnson, Philip 13, 82–3, 97–8, 114, 149, 151–2,

191, 231

att Building, New York 208

Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove 191–2

Deconstructivist Architecture show 238

Glass House 173

ids Center, Minneapolis 205, 206

Lincoln Center, New York 228–9

New York Pavilion, World’s Fair 193

Pennzoil Place, Houston 205

Seagram Building 159–61, 160

Urban Glass House 254

Jones & Emmons 168, 172

Jones, Fay 231–3, 233

Jones, Harry Wild 28

Jones, Quincy 172–3

Jones, Roessle, Olschner & Wiener 116

Jones Studio 252, 252

Joy, Rick 237, 252

Judd, Donald 230

Kahn, Albert 54, 55–7, 56, 57, 92, 93, 142, 147

Kahn, Ely Jacques 86, 117

Kahn, Julius 55

Kahn, Louis 201, 210, 252

Carver Court, Coatesville 145–6, 146, 149

Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth 230–31, 232

Richards Medical Research Building,

Philadelphia 166–7

Salk Institute, La Jolla 166, 167

Yale Art Gallery, Connecticut 185

Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles 225–6, 227

Kansas City 79, 85, 103

Mast Advertising and Publishing

Headquarters 243–4

Nelson-Atkins Museum 266

Power and Light Company Building 85

Kastner, Alfred 132–4, 133

Keck & Keck 127, 128

Kellum, John 38, 39

Kentucky Dam powerhouse 119, 119

Kiesler, Frederick 109, 110

Kiley, Daniel 115, 172, 172

Kimball and Wisedell 42

Klein, Alexander 63

Klumb, Heinrich (Henry) 139–41, 189

Koch, Carl 174

Kocher, A. Lawrence 81, 82, 104

Knoll, Florence 158

Koning Eizenberg Architects 256–7, 258, 260

Koolhaas, Rem 77, 80, 270

kpf 248

Kraetsch & Kraetsch 127

Kump, Ernest 190

Landscape Urbanism 240–41

Lapidus, Morris 183–4, 185

Las Vegas 184–5, 186, 197, 226

Lautner, John 139, 174, 175, 182, 250

Le Corbusier 80, 81, 82, 118, 120, 122, 146, 196,

204, 211

Leers and Weinzapfel 246

Legorreta, Ricardo 242

Lescaze, William 83, 116, 120, 134, 138

Libeskind, Daniel 238, 248, 249, 266

Lin, Maya 233

Livable Places 259, 259

Lönberg-Holm, Knud 82, 84, 105

Los Angeles 103, 130, 135–6

Atlantic Richfield Building 85

Bradbury Building 26

cbs broadcast station 120

Culver City 244

Dodge House 67

Dunsmuir Flats 130–31, 131, 149

Hollyhock House 97, 101

Korean Village 227

Lovell Health House 97, 98–100, 99, 100

3 1 5 I n d ex

Music Center 229

nbc broadcast station 120

Pacific Design Center 204

Sheats-Goldstein House 174, 175

Strathmore 130

Temporary Contemporary 230

ucla 246, 246, 270, 271

vdl Research House 129

Walt Disney Concert Hall 268

Watts Towers 156

Wilshire Boulevard 105

Yucca-Vine Market 106

Louisiana

Municipal Incinerator, Shreveport 116

Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans 227

Shreveport railway company 181

Superdome, New Orleans 228

Lundy, Paul 184

Lustron 174

Lyndon, Donlyn 223–4, 224

Lynn, Greg 236

McAllister, Wayne 184

McDonald’s Golden Arches 182

McDonough, William 240, 247

Mack, Mark 250

MacKie and Kamrath 166

McKim, Mead & White 43, 76, 76, 198

McLaughlin, James 39

McLaughlin, Robert 130, 130

McLuhan, Marshall 197

McMurrin, Sterling 241

McNulty, Thomas 219–20, 220

Maillart, Robert 54

Maine, Haystack Mountain School 190

Mangurian, Robert 225

Manley, Marion 189, 191

Marquis & Stoller 175, 179

Marston, Sylvanus B. 69–71, 69

Maryland

Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Factory,

Baltimore 147

Merrill Education Center, Annapolis 242

Massachusetts

Boston see Boston

German Homestead Association,

Dedham 30, 30

Gropius House, Lincoln 6, 125–7, 125

Stevens-McNulty House, Lincoln 219–20,

220

United Shoe Manufacturing Company,

Beverly 53–4, 54

Massie, William 236, 237

May, Cliff 127

May, Ernst 132

Maybeck, Bernard 66, 74, 74

Mayer, Albert 115

Mayne, Thomas 261–2, 272–5, 274

Meier, Richard 196, 208–9, 209, 217, 219, 230,

253, 261

Mendelsohn, Erich 55, 146, 164, 191

Meston, Stanley 182

Miami

Atlantis Building 214, 214

Bacardi usa 163

Beach 130, 183–4

Bird-Cage House 173

Caribbean Marketplace 239

Overtown Mall 239

Seaquarium 181

University 189, 191

Michigan

Detroit see Detroit

Ford Motor Company headquarters,

Dearborn 181

Ford plant, Highland Park 54, 55–7, 56, 57

Ford plant, River Rouge 92, 93, 247–8

General Motors Technical Center, Warren

161–2, 162, 163

Pontiac Silverdome 228

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 82, 159, 174, 250

Berlin glass skyscraper project 158

Farnsworth House, Plano 173

Illinois Institute of Technology 6, 140, 141

Lafayette Park, Detroit 175, 177

Lake Shore Drive, Chicago 174–5, 176

Seagram Building, New York 159–61, 160,

163

Miller/Hull Partnership 262–3, 263

Minneapolis 215

Cedar-Riverside 215

Guthrie Theater 186, 189

ids Center 205, 206

light-rail transit stations 247

Lindsay Brothers Warehouse 28

Lutheran Christ Church 191

Weisman Art Museum 234

Walker Art Center 156, 167, 266

Minnesota

St John’s Abbey and University,

3 1 6

Collegetown 191

Southdale Mall, Edina 183, 184

mit 18, 129, 154, 208

mltw (Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker)

215, 223–4, 224

Mock, Elizabeth 139, 149, 152

Mockbee, Sam 253, 256, 257

Montana, Big Sky House 236

Moore, Charles 197, 227

Morgan, Julia 66, 73

Morphosis 261–2, 272–5, 274

Morrish, William 240

Morrow, Irving and Gertrude 116

Moses, Robert 95, 117, 118, 193, 228–9

Moss, Eric Owen 244

Mumford, Lewis 66, 83, 89, 95, 102, 115, 151,

161, 198

Murphy/Jahn 262

Museum of Modern Art (moma), New York

10, 83–4, 114, 119–20, 132, 149, 167, 175,

195–6, 204, 206, 238, 266, 281

Myers, Barton 242

Neff, Wallace 130

Netsch, Walter 159, 223, 224

Neutra, Richard 12, 83, 94, 100, 101, 116, 127,

136–7

Channel Heights, Los Angeles 145

Community Church, Garden Grove 191,

192

Kaufmann House, Palm Springs 169–71,

169, 178

Landfair, Los Angeles 130

Lovell Health House, Los Angeles 97,

98–100, 99, 100

Strathmore 130, Los Angeles 130

vdl Research House, Los Angeles 129

New Jersey

Bell Laboratories, Holmdel 165

Pacific Borax plant, Bayonne 53

Princeton University 190

Radburn 102, 130

New Mexico

Alamagordo 146

La Luz 215, 216

Los Alamos 146

New Urbanism 253–4

New York City 49–50, 77, 78, 80, 95, 102, 104,

212, 215

American Folk Art Museum 268, 269

American Radiator Building 86

A.T. Stewart Department Store 38, 39

att Building 208

Barclay-Vesey Building 85

Battery Park City 207, 214–15

Bayard Building 27

Broadway 42, 76–7

Bronx Developmental Center 208–9, 209

Brooklyn Bridge 16, 18

Central Park 39

Chrysler Building 86–8

Citicorp Building 204

Club Gallant 109

Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital 105–6,

107

Condé Nast Tower 248

Coney Island, Brooklyn 77, 77, 88

Cross-Bronx Expressway 118

Daily News Building 86

de Koonings’ Soho loft 155

Empire State Building 88

Equitable Life Insurance Building 20–21,

20

Film Guild Cinema 109, 110

First Houses, East Village 134

Freedom Tower 248, 249

Fresh Kills 240–41

George Washington Bridge 117–18

Grand Central Station 76, 89

Ground Zero 248, 249

Harlem River Houses 134

Henry Hudson Parkway 118

High Line 241

Idlewild (Kennedy) Airport 185, 187

Ladies’ Mile 39

Landmarks Preservation Commission 198

Lever House 159

Lincoln Center 228–9, 267

McCarren Pool 117

McGraw-Hill Building 86

Madison Square Theater 42–3, 42

Marcus Garvey Park Village 212

Melrose Community Center 260, 261

Metropolitan Life Insurance Building 24

Municipal Asphalt Plant 117, 149

Natural History Museum 266

New School for Social Research 107, 108

New York Times Building 248

Newspaper Row 21

Park Avenue 76

3 1 7 I n d ex

Pennsylvania Station 76, 76, 198

People’s Institute 75

Pepsi-Cola Building 159

Radio City 89, 108

Riverbend 212

Rockefeller Center 89–91, 90, 91

Roosevelt Island 215

Schermerhorn House 257

Seagram Building 159–61, 160, 163

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 185–6,

188, 266

Sunnyside Gardens, Queens 102

Terminal City 76, 76, 89

Times Square 107

Twin Parks, Bronx 212

Union Carbide Building 157

United Nations Building 180

Urban Glass House 254

Virtual Stock Exchange 244, 245

Waldorf Astoria 75

walk-ups 36

Western Union 21

Westway 240

Williamsburg Houses 134

Woolworth Building 61

World Trade Center 206–7, 248

World’s Fair of 1939 147; of 1964 193

New York State

Aluminaire House, Syosset 82

Corning Museum of Glass 237, 238, 242

Elkin House, Amagansett 181

Empire State Plaza, Albany 226

Dia:Beacon 266

Guaranty Building, Buffalo 27

Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo

58–60, 58, 59, 74

Levittown 171–2

Martin House, Buffalo 64

Mineola Theater, Long Island 198

Mitchell-Lama Housing Program 212

Pierce Arrow factory, Buffalo 55

Rochester schools 75

The Houses at Sagaponac 252–3

University Park Apartments, Ithaca 194,

196

Urban Development Corp. (udc) 212,

215–16

Washburn-Crosby Elevator, Buffalo 55, 55

Watson Research Center, Yorktown

Heights 165

Newman, Oscar 212

Newsom, Joseph 33, 36

Noguchi, Isamu 157

North Carolina, Research Triangle Park 207,

207

Noyes, Eliot 165

Ohio

Cincinnati see Cincinnati

Columbus schools 222, 223

Goodyear Airship Dock, Akron 93

Lakeview Terrace, Cleveland 112

National Investors’ Hall of Fame, Akron

266

Southside Community Center, Columbus

225

Standard Oil Company, Cleveland 105,

106

Toledo Museum of Art 266

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus

265–6, 265

Oklahoma City

banks 163, 164

Federal Campus 261

Mummers Theater 229–30, 229

Okomoto, Rai 227

Olmsted, Frederick Law 29, 29, 30, 37, 39, 70,

71

Olmsted and Vaux 39

oma 237, 270

Open Design Office 225

Oregon

Equitable Building, Portland 158–9, 158

First Presbyterian Church, Cottage Grove

191

Kaiserville (Vanport) 144

Portland Urban Production District 248

Park and Burgess 81

Parsons, Ralph M. 246, 246

pbmi 243–4

Pei, I. M. 150, 205, 230

Pelli, Cesar 204, 248

Pennsylvania

Alcoa Aluminum Company, Pittsburgh

150, 163

Aluminum City Terrace, New Kensington

145

Bethlehem 145

Carver Court, Coatesville 145–6, 146, 149

3 1 8

Fallingwater, Mill Run 6, 122–3

Gateway Center, Pittsburgh 154

Pittsburgh Technology Center 248

Vanna Venturi (Mother’s) House,

Chestnut Hill 217, 218

Pereira, William 204

Perkins, Dwight 75

Perkins, Wheeler and Will 137, 137, 149

Perry, Clarence 81

Peters, Nelle 103

Pfeiffer, Hardy Holzman 222, 223

Philadelphia 101

Beth Shalom, Elkins Park 191

Carl Mackley Houses 132–4, 133

Guild House 210–11, 210

Penn Center 154

Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Tower

87, 88

Provident Life and Trust Company 19

Richards Medical Research Building,

166–7

Society Hill 154

University Modular vii Chiller Plant 246

Polivitsky, Igor 127, 173, 183

Polk, Willis 60, 61, 66

Polshek Partnership 257, 266

Pond, Allen and Irving 75

Portman, John 202–4, 220, 226

Post, George B. 20–21, 20

Predock, Antoine 215, 216, 250

public housing (usha) 134–5, 177–8, 180,

211–12, 260

Puerto Rico University 189

Pugh + Scarpa 259, 259

Purcell & Elmslie 61, 116

Pyatok, Michael 253, 260

Quigley, Rob W. 250, 251

Quincy, Jr, Edmund 30, 30

Quonset huts 142–3

Ransome, Ernest L. 53–4, 54

Rapson, Ralph 186, 189

Rashid, Hani 244, 245

Raymond, Antonin 145, 146

Raymond, Eleanor 129

Reagan, Ronald 231

Reed & Stem 76, 76

Reid, John Lyon 189

Reinhard & Hofmeister 89–91, 90, 91

Reiss, Winold 109

Renzo Piano Building Workshop 248, 267–8

Rhode Island, Brown University 223–4

Richardson, H. H. 28–9, 28, 44, 84

Robertson, Jacquelin 253

Robinson, Hilyard 134

Roche & Dinkeloo 202, 203, 204, 230

Rodia, Simon 156

Rogers, James Gamble 105–6, 107

Roloff, Bailey, Bozalis, Dickinson 163, 164

Root, John 17, 22–5, 23, 25

Roth, Emery 206–7

Rowe, Colin 21, 161, 204–5

Rudolph, Paul 173, 173, 178, 188, 190, 201, 207,

207, 211

Rural Studio 256, 257

Saarinen, Eero 12

Bell Laboratories, Holmdel 165

Crow Island School, Winnetka 137, 137,

149

Dulles International Airport 6

gm Technical Center, Warren 161–2, 162,

163

ibm building, World’s Fair 193

Idlewild (Kennedy) Airport, New York

185, 187

Watson Research Center, Yorktown

Heights 165

Saarinen, Eliel

Chicago Tribune competition 84, 85, 85

Crow Island School, Winnetka 137, 137,

149

gm Technical Center, Warren 161–2, 162,

163

Lutheran Christ Church 191

St Louis 71, 157

Botanical Garden Climatron 181

Eads Bridge 18

Gateway Arch 154

Lambert-St Louis Airport Terminal 185

Pruitt-Igoe 177, 180, 212

Wainwright Building 27–8, 27

Saitowitz, Stanley 254, 255

San Francisco 36, 227

Crown-Zellerbach Building 159

Embarcadero Center 154

Federal Building 261–2

Golden Gate Bridge 116

Golden Gateway 154

3 1 9 I n d ex

Halladie Building 60, 61

Museum of Art 127, 167

Nihonmachi 227

Peace Pagoda, Japantown 227

St Francis Square 175, 179

Silicon Graphics Headquarters 244

Telesis group 114

Transamerica Building 204

Woodside Gardens 212

Yerba Buena Lofts 254, 255

sanaa 266

Sandy & Babcock 194, 196

Al-Sayed, Marwan 252

Schindler, R. M. 96, 97, 98, 98, 101, 127

Schlanger, Ben 109

Schwartz, Martha 242–3, 243

Scott Brown, Denise 197, 211, 226, 245

Seabees 142, 143–4, 144

Seattle

Chapel of St Ignatius 270–71, 273

Northgate shopping center 182

Olympic Sculpture Park 241

Olympic Tower 85

Public Library 270

Sert, Josep Lluís 182

Sharratt, John 211, 212–13

Shaw Metz & Associates 178

Shreve, R. R. 134

shop (Sharples Holden Pasquarelli) 237

site (Sculpture in the Environment) 200

Smith, Cloethiel Woodard 213

Smith, Ted 250

Smith-Miller + Hawkinson 237, 242, 238

Snow, Julie 247

social housing see public housing

Soleri, Paolo 200–1, 252

Solomon, Daniel 253

som (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) 208, 248

Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs 190

Amerika Haus, Germany 181

Crown-Zellerbach Building, San

Francisco 159

Experimental House, prefabricated 147

Freedom Tower, New York 248, 249

Inland Steel Building, Chicago 159, 178

Lever House, New York 159

Oak Ridge, Tennessee 146–8, 147

Pepsi-Cola Building, New York 159

Sears Tower, Chicago 205–6

Union Carbide Building, New York 157,

159

University of Illinois 223, 2224

Weyerhaeuser Headquarters, Tacoma

207–8

Soriano, Raphael 127, 172

South Carolina, Columbia Courthouse 261

Spain, Bilbao 266

Stein, Clarence 102, 130

Stern, Robert 197

Stevens, Mary Otis 219–20, 220

Stickley, Gustav 68

Stone, Edward Durell 181, 183

Stonorov, Oskar 132–4, 133, 145

Stubbins, Hugh 204

Studio Completiva 254

Studios Architecture 244

Sullivan, Louis 18, 19, 25–7, 40, 42, 44–5, 61, 68

Switzerland, Blur Building, expo 2002 267,

267

Tafuri, Manfredo 25, 161, 219

Taniguchi, Yoshio 266–7

Taut, Bruno 63

Telkes, Dr Maria 129

Tennessee, Oak Ridge 146–8, 147

Tennessee Valley Authority (tva) 119–20, 119,

120, 149

Texas

Arneson River Theater, San Antonio 136,

136

Austin Company Aircraft ‘Blackout’

Plant, Fort Worth 143

Center for Maximum Potential Building

Systems, Laredo 240

Chinati Foundation, Marfa 230

Houston see Houston

Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth 230–31, 232

La Villita, San Antonio 136

Schlumberger Oil Company, Austin 207

Solana ibm Westland, Dallas 242–3, 243

Texas Instruments Building, Richardson

165, 165

West Columbia School 188, 190

Tigerman, Stanley 259

Toro & Ferrer 183

Tschumi, Bernard 238

Tsien, Billie 268, 269

Turner, C.P.A. 54

Urban, Joseph 107, 108

3 2 0

Utah, Dougway 146

Van Alen, William 86–8

van der Ryn, Sim 213, 213

Veblen, Thorstein 48, 80

Venturi, Robert 195–6, 197, 210–11, 210, 217,

218, 226, 245

Vernacular Architecture Forum 239

Virginia

best Forest Building, Richmond 200,

200

Dulles Airport 6

Hollin Hills 172, 172

Oakdale farms, Norfolk 144

Reston 215

Wachsman, Konrad 130, 146

Wagner, Martin 130

Walker, Peter 242–3, 243

Walker, Ralph 85

Wank Adams Slavin Associates 260, 261

Wank, Roland 119–20, 119, 148

Ware & Van Brunt 30, 30

Warnecke, John 164

Warren & Wetmore 76, 76

Washington, dc

Kennedy Center 229

Langston Terrace 134

National Gallery of Art 230

River Park Mutual Homes 175, 178

Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial 233

Washington State

Bainbridge Island City Hall 262–3, 263

Hanford 146

McLoughlin Heights 145

Seattle see Seattle

Weyerhaeuser Headquarters, Tacoma

207–8

Wright Guest House, The Highlands 251

Waterman, Hazel 73

Weed, Robert Law 127, 189, 191

Weese, Harry 226

Weinberg, Conrad & Teare 112

Whites 196–7, 201, 231

Wiener, Samuel 116

Wilby, Ernest 54, 55–7, 56, 57

Williams, Paul 184, 186

Williams, Tod 268, 269

Willis, Beverly 208

Willson, Corwin 130

Wilson, John Lewis 134

Wisconsin

American System-Built Houses

Company, Milwaukee 67

A. O. Smith Research Building,

Milwaukee 93, 93

Jacobs House, Madison 123, 124, 129

Johnson Wax Administration Building,

Racine 120–22, 121, 149

Short Run Production Company,

Richmond 247

Wright, Frank Lloyd 12, 46, 47, 63, 75, 97, 172,

189

Alice Millard House, Pasadena 101, 101

American System-Built Houses

Company, Milwaukee 67

Beth Shalom, Elkins Park 191

Broadacre City 122

Coonley House 30, 64

Fallingwater 6, 122–3

Francisco Terrace, Oak Park, Illinois 71

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles 97, 101

Jacobs House, Madison 123, 124, 129

Johnson Wax Administration Building,

Racine 120–22, 121, 149

Larkin Building, Buffalo 58–60, 58, 59,

74, 89, 121

Martin House, Buffalo 64

model suburb design, Chicago 71–3, 72

Robie House, Chicago 64–6, 65

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,

New York 185–6, 188

Taliesin West, Arizona 138–9, 139, 149, 252

Tomek House, Riverside, Illinois 30

Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois 74

Ward Willitts House, Highland Park,

Illinois 64

Wright House, Oak Park, Illinois 34–5, 34

Wright, Henry 71, 82, 97, 102

Wright, Lloyd 97, 101, 106, 116, 191

Wurster, William 127, 145

Wyman, George 26

Yamasaki, Minoru 12, 163, 175, 180, 185, 206–7,

212, 227

Yeon, John 127

Young Electric Sign Company (yesco) 185,

186

Usa

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